Avoid the mistake of over training your athletes. How do you determine their level of fatigue and how do you adjust their training?
In the video clip below Ryan Spencer, Human Performance Specialist, discusses the pitfalls of overtraining your athletesAll coaches need to be constantly watching their players in regards to how they are handling fatigue throughout the season. A common mistake is to not watch players before or after practice sessions as they are either warming up or cooling down. These are some of the best times to really watch a player in how they are moving and also interacting with teammates. This classroom session describes different techniques and ways to help monitor your players in regards to overtraining.
A very simple way to monitor your players is to have a simple conversation and ask them to rate their overall fatigue and muscle soreness on a scale of 1-10. If you take the numbers from all of your players and average them together, you can get a good idea and sense of how the team is feeling. This also helps judge whether the intensity of the practice sessions needs to be increased or decreased moving forward. This could be done as often as you like whether it be daily, every 2-3 days, or weekly to check the players.
A common problem for coaches is to try and push too hard, too early in the season. Players will not get in game shape in a couple days or even a couple weeks. It takes several weeks or months for some with consistent training to reach a high conditioning level. A player’s health and safety should always be your number one priority as a coach. As much as we all want to have every player in the best shape possible so we have a team that is fit and prepared, this rarely happens and is not worth taking a risk such as pushing a player to run more or do extra conditioning if they are struggling to make it through a practice session.
Ryan Spencer’s presentation was delivered at a recent Glazier Soccer Clinic. For information about how to gain access to his entire presentation, as well as hundreds of other clinic presentations, click the link Glazier Soccer Clinic
The YouTube video below has sound, so please make sure that your volume is turned up and that you have access to the site. Note some schools block access to YouTube.