Pre-Season Training Loads

The above image shows our "Training Load in Sport Zones" and "Session Duration" over the first week of pre-season.  Again, taking into account that the Training Load (TL) for a game is around 320 points, you can see that we had a very high training load on 8/16; an average for all players of around 480 points, with a total training duration of around 3 hours.  Perhaps even more significant is the fact that on this first day about 360 of those points came from the top 2 zones, indicating very intensive work as well. 

 

The first day listed, 8/15, was our fitness testing day.  The next 4 days we had 2 sessions per day, 1 session on friday and saturday shows our first pre-season game.  While this game shows only around 240 points on average, only a few players played the entire match, so obviously the numbers are lower than what I say is typical for a match.  As we do not wear the heart rate monitors (hrm's) during regular season matches, I use each players training time to calculate training loads for regular season and post season matches.  For example, 320 points over 90 minutes equals 3.5 points per minute of play.  So if a player plays 60 minutes, I multiply 60 by 3.5 (213) to use as their training load for that game.  I know, this is an average . . . it will depend on position, level of the opponent and ranking at a particular time in the season, but this gets us pretty close.  I'm not quite comfortable enough to use positional averages for games, but I am working toward this as I collect more data. 

 

Of particular interest, is the extremely high TL in the top 2 zones during the first session, then we see this number dropping as we go thru the training week up to the first match.  On the whole, all our coaches were very happy with the sharpness of the team during this first week, so we did not see that this had a real negative impact during the first week.