AAGS 2021

26 Round Table 1 - How to manage the training Daniele Bonanno (Football Performance Coordinator - Aspire Academy) was the moderator of this round table. He opened the discussion by introducing the topic of the challenges and difficulties of pre-season and the time constraints involved. When we talk about training, the challenges of the pre- season and time constraints immediately spring to mind. With the NBA facing such issues in recent years, which strategy did you embrace to cope with such demands/ challenges? Torres: I’ve been working in the NBA for the last seven years so everything I’m going to explain comes from my knowledge and experience in the NBA and all the teams I worked with, but I think we can relate a lot. We have experience in having short preseasons and the issue that teams, players, coaches and the league are facing is that you have such a short period of time to prepare players, you cannot use just that period of time as preparation for the season. So, we try to educate players, and it’s now a norm, you have to work all year around and you have to use your time off, whatever it’s from April till September or August, depending on when you finish the season, you have to take care of your body and your mind all the year around and work by yourself or with your team in the off season. I don’t think the scenario is happening anymore that you have barely a month off and then you get to day 1 in the training camp and you start working. We don’t have time. The approach is: “You keep working on yourself and you arrive in the training camp almost ready to start.” Endurance is a determinant of performance, with the game demands influencing the nature of this physical capacity in football. Given your expertise, what are your considerations and philosophy for the enhancement of this area? Fudge: Endurance trainings are very similar to other sports in the sense that you look at the physiological demands of the match events and then you match training with that. I think one of the less glamorous things that people focus on is just general aerobic capacity, which is very important for recovery. Recovery within sessions or within games, you’re running up and down the pitch, between sessions and also across the season as well. It’s what fuels that recovery process and makes it more efficient. To give an example with somebody like Mo Farah, he would have run 120 miles a week, week in, week out building what we would call an engine. When the crunch time comes, and you go to the Olympics you need to be able to recover very efficiently. You’re doing a 10,000-meter race on Friday, doing a 5,000 on Wednesday and a 5,000 again on Friday, all within a seven-day period. So, I think one of the less glamorous but one of the most important sides is building that engine over a period of time. Congested fixtures is another challenge for coaches and support staff, with NBA players second to none in terms of games played during the regular season. How did coaches and staff adapt their programmes? Torres: It’s always a hot topic in the NBA, how to manage the schedule and the players. I think that they play 82 games in a very short period of time from October until April plus the number of games you play in the playoffs. Obviously, basketball is different than football. Basketball is a smaller field. It’s indoor weather conditions and more in control. Football is a bigger field, played on turf. It’s a different sport, different distances, high speeds, maximum speed Lorena Torres Barry Fudge