Designing your training programme

When designing your training programme it is important to analyse the demands of your sport. Yes this may seem simple but its true and important when designing an effective training strategy. You need to consider what type of sport you take part in. Is performance based on endurance or power? The main fitness component of your sport creates the platform for your training programme. Who are the top performers in your sport and what qualities do they share? In terms of team sports the most successful players are generally the most powerful and who can efficiently apply that power to movement. For example; in ice hockey Alexander Ovechkin is undoubtedly one of the top performers. Ovechkin has tremendous power which he is very efficiently able to apply to movements such as skating, shooting and hitting. 

So in this case the training programme for an ice hockey player it should focus on power and speed as that is the most important fitness component for performance. If your sport is sprint orientated like ice hockey and players are stopping and starting frequently while performing high intensity efforts you need to think about who long the players perform these bouts of exercise for and over what time scale, i.e. how long does the game last? This is important because the training programme needs to mirror the energy systems used during competition.

The training programme needs to follow simple but effective principles. We must learn to walk before we can run and sprint. This is the same when designing a training programme. It is vital to master the basic movements before learning complex movements. Something as simple as a body weight squat must be performed correctly before progressing. Only once the basic movement patterns are mastered should players begin to perform complex exercises. I believe that it is important for even the most experienced trainers to go back to basics a number of times during a training programme. Players may be performing very complex exercises but it is possible to lose mastery of those basic movement patterns that form the base of complex movements. In my opinion basic movement patterns are great to apply during de-load phases of a training programme so athletes don't lose their muscle memory of those basic movement patterns.

Image: http://www.russianmachineneverbreaks.com/tag/knubles-knights/ (Photo credit: Mitchell Layton)