According to the research* the greatest number of goals are scored in the last minutes of a match. In the same time the ammount of Total Distance covered (TD) and distance covered with high intensity running and sprinting drastically falls down. Thus, the last minutes are the most crucial period of a match, where the match is won or lost. The question is how to improve performance during this period?
Fatigue development is not happening only at the end of a match, but rather normally within a game, after the period of greater load (5min of greates load in a game is followed by period of reduced load – TD and other perfomance variable).
According to my current opinion, the performance at the end of the match can be improved in the following ways:
-
Improving the aerobic power and capacity which will eventually limit the ’ammount’ of fatigue in the first place, at the end of the match
-
Improving the ability of the players to perform under the state of fatigue
-
Improving the smartness of the players and ’pacing strategy’ to save energy and power for the end
According to the concept of contextual learning and skill acquisitionion/rehersal, the fatigue level (along with emotions, arousal, motivation…) represent internal context of motor skill. The external context are environmental factors, like opponents and their action. Thus, the athlete must be able to perform ’ordinary’ skills under ’unordinary’ conditions, or in other words to perform well under fatigue. Altought I have wrote about the absurd concept of ’perfoming under fatigue’, I do believe now that players should, after developing aerobic power/capacity to limit ammount of fatigue in the first place, try to improve the ability to perform well at the end of the match. Altought, we cannot simulate the entire internal context of the last minutes of a match (emotional, arousal etc), we can simulate fatigue levels.
The irrepleacable method to improve last minutes performances are playing games itself. Thus friendly games are very imprtant means and methods. But, due organizational issues, friendly games are not allway possible. The propsed method here may be absurd at first, but if planned correctly and done sparringly can become very imprtant part of your training system.
We know that Charlie Francis opinion regarding SpeedEndurance work for team sports. I respect it and believe in it, but I do have my own brain to think. And my brain, at this stage of development, figured out that doing SE work prior team practices, with the aim of purposely developing fatigue can simulate fatigue levels during the last couple of minutes and thus improve the ability to perform under this stage.
Yeah, I know – this is recipe for injury. Trying to simulate ’health detrimental’ last minutes of a game within training itself is not smart thing to do. Thus, we do this very sparringly and only for a week or two during a PREP period and after athletes developed good ammount of speed, power and work capacity. Actually, research showed that traditional conditioning (without ball) may increase the possibility for injury compared to small-sided games. For this very reason, instead of doing 120m shuttles, suicides, 300yard shuttles, 30m repeated sprints, we can do (in soccer) a duel game of 2on2 to flood the legs with metabolite, deplet glycogen and CP levels.
Please note again, that this kind of training of done with MINIMAL emphasis durig prep period and done during the ’shock’ microcycles.
Using this method, instead of ’pounding’ athletes for 75minutes to induce fatigue levels, we can spend 20mins on SE drills and do 40mins of tactical games or aerobic games.
Comments, opinions?
- Published in Reilly – Science of Soccer