Collective metabolic power exertion in soccer training: recapitulation 1.

After so many posts in which we have share some specific data about this issue in different specific activities as games, tactical games, and small sided possession and soccer games of different number of players (professionals and amateur players) participating and different rules and field dimensions, is time of a little recapitulation.

The original idea of all this work is to be able to propose a different than traditional approach for the specific conditioning of soccer players.

This more traditional approach is based on the general assumption that for the development of the endurance concept, there is a way based on the interval time duration of each, in this case, specific task.

So a first point to take into account is that we want our players to have a better endurance ... but, what we understand for this term "endurance" when we refer to the specificity? and specially when we refer to the characteristics of the competition (games and also the fact of playing games in non-complete recovered situation?

A basic common idea is just to be able to maintain all along the duration of the game the demands that competitions could impose to the players.

Not here the problem.

After this common idea about endurance, then it arrives another "hurdle" to go over: how to develop this "endurance" ...

To big issues with so many curves to go through!!!

Let's come back to the start point: competition.

We have seen how our players demonstrate their collective metabolic power exertion in competition. We have seen some of the characteristics of this specific exertion, related to it's duration and intensity, so at first, we have a picture of the direction we have to follow in order to achieve the main target: be ready for competition. That will mean that we have to prepare our players specifically for being able to maintain their collective metabolic power exertion at least under similar characteristics that are demonstrated during games, but probably we should be ready to try to increase their collective specific conditioning performance to a further step, and that means that our players should be ready to demonstrate or higher values of collective metabolic power exertion intensity, or higher values of its duration, or much more difficult, both aspects at the same time.

And all this during the game, and during consecutive games ...

To keep focus, despite we are talking about "endurance", we cannot loose the view of the hole picture, and that means also that related always to specific conditioning, our players show an intermittent pattern of activity, in which they alternate actions and relative pauses (so different levels of intensity and duration).

But about this actions, we surely want the players to be ready to perform them more intense and longer and more frequent ... really difficult, but this is the "idea" ...

So we want them to keep intensity both with exertion, and this is not so easy to do but also not easy to train specifically, because that requires using specific tasks with some characteristics that allows the players to demonstrate exactly this: higher intensity (not only exertion!!! That's a common mistake).

And here is where the evidence of the data recollected in professional and amateur soccer players, and shared with you, should make you reconsider if we are going to the correct direction ...

Stay tuned!