Big Mistakes of Football Training #2 – Over-Training

Around the country, thousands of amateur managers have been trying to use pre-season to build their players’ fitness levels in order to get them in the best possible shape for the first game of the season.

Unfortunately, due to many managers’ inability to shake off old ideas and a general lack of understanding about football fitness, training sessions can often prove largely ineffective, or sometimes counter-productive.

In this series, I’ll be looking at common mistakes made by managers during training sessions.

Mistake #2: Over-Training

Dutch ‘Football Fitness’ expert Raymond Verheijen’s Twitter account is one very much worth following if you are interested when it comes to the Fitness and Training sides of the game.

Verheijen doesn’t mince his words when it comes to judging professional clubs’ training methods, often stating his surprise at how backwards some clubs’ regimes can be.

The main risk associated with Over-Training is that of injuries, which occur when football training regimes become unbalanced. Whilst it’s obvious professional footballers will dedicate many more hours to week to the sport than your average amateur footballer, it can still be a problem, especially during the pre-season.

The fact that elite professional clubs, including Arsenal, Tottenham, Everton and Liverpool have all been criticised by Verheijen for their approach to player fitness treatment, with all their money invested into sports science, suggests that knowledge of how to effectively treat footballers is something lacking throughout football. If professional managers aren’t clued up on this, what’s the chance that amateur football managers are?

How Can Managers Avoid Over-Training?

It’s quite easy to avoid over-training for amateur managers, purely as training sessions are likely to be only once or twice a week. Yet also it’s important to pass the message on to any players who either participate in others sports, or regularly go to the gym.

You should never be performing double-training sessions in a day which include a repetition of physical workout on the same part of the body.

It’s very important to let players’ bodies recover between training sessions and matches. In general, it takes 48 hours for muscles to fully recover. Working the same muscle group with intervals between sessions of less than 48 hours leads to an increased likelihood of injury, the reward is simply not worth the risk.

Communicating the potential effects of the problem is possibly the most effective way of solving it. Your players are their own people, and it will ultimately be them who decide how much fitness training they do away from the pitch.

If you are aware of their training regimes though, you as the manager have the ability to change the player’s football training schedule. If they have already been for a run on the day of training, get them doing upper body or tactical work, if they have been doing weights, create a drill which focuses on parts of the body they haven’t exercised.

The final important thing for managers to communicate to players is often one of the toughest to enforce due to players’ general enthusiasm and a ‘Man-up’ culture in football. If players feel any slight injury during training, it’s not worth carrying on, the problem will only get worse. Try to get them to do a pain-free warm down if possible, then send them to the showers.

Related Posts:

• 5-a-side Football with Too Few or Too Many Players – Solved
• Goal Line Gaffes XI – If Only Goal Line Technology Existed
• Big Mistakes of Football Training #1 – Long Runs
• Your Pre-Season Football Training Guide: Week 6
• Your Pre-Season Football Training Guide: Week 5