Adrian Cois Performance Blog

Blog about sports performance training and preparation.

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Why do teams win?

Why do teams win?

Adrian Cois

[email protected]

Why do sporting teams win? Is it because they have the best players, the best technology, the biggest budget or the best fans? If you could answer this question I would imagine you’d find yourself as CEO of any number of professional teams throughout the world. I may not seem overly ambitious as I write a blog on this topic as it is pretty well known that the teams that win are those who are the best week in week out. Generally these are the teams who have the best players and therefore the biggest budgets. I was inspired to write this blog based on the number of times I hear things like “we won because you made us the fittest team” from athletes or strength and conditioning coaches say – generally about other teams – “look at all the players cramping up with 20 to go – their S&C coach mustn’t know what he/she is doing!” I think that too many people take and give credit for winning – when there is – according to Adrian Cois – no one reason for a team winning, but a number of critical aspects which need to be done well for success.

There are three elements, which make teams successful in any sport:

1.     Cattle – successful teams need to have the best players in key positions.

2.     Philosophy – teams win when they execute their game plan to a higher percentage than their opponents.

3.     Being Healthy – if the health of your players both mental and physical interferes with either of the first two elements – a team will not be successful.

In a way my “rules” are like the rules of robotics. They interact with each other and if you don’t have all of them together at the same time your ability to be successful in the long term will be severely diminished.

The Cattle

Let’s start with first most crucial element – the players. How many times have you seen an old player who drinks beer during the week, is overweight and unfit – go out on the ground and perform? Regularly – it happens all of the time. They may not be able to put together a full season of games because of injury or ill-discipline (not to generalise!) but when they play – even in an unideal state – they are invaluable resources. If you don’t have the best players playing in your team in key positions – it doesn’t matter how fit, smart or tactical you are – your team will not be successful in the long run.

The Philosophy

If you don’t have a philosophy, which the coaching staff, club administrators, medical staff and players BELIEVE in and follow through with EVERYDAY, a team will not be successful in the long run. What do I mean by philosophy? I think that this term encompasses a number of aspects, which contribute to having this element of club success functioning the way it should be:

·      Playing Structure – the coaching staff need to set up a playing structure where everyone knows their roles and are accountable for their roles. Every time that a player gets the ball he/she knows what their next move should be. This is done on the training ground – you practice and practice until it is second nature so that when you play on the weekend you know what your game plan is because you have already put it in place in training throughout that week and season. For example look at the two top teams in the A-League in 2011/12, Roar and Mariners – they go at it head to head stoically sticking to their tactical structures. You shouldn’t change your philosophy week in week out. Without having concrete statistical data behind me, I will say the teams that win are the teams that execute their game plan to the highest percentage as compared with their opponents on the day.

·      Discipline – you need to be consistent with discipline. I have been involved in too many teams where one rule exists for some people while one exists for another person. This does not allow trust to be developed. A player needs to know what is not acceptable and that if they make the choice to undertake that unacceptable action that there are set consequences and that those consequences are going to happen.

·      Belief & Follow Through – you have to believe in what you are doing and follow through with it on a daily basis. There is no point installing a new training technique or system and letting it go by the wayside without acknowledging that you made an active choice to remove it from you regime. For example, if you say that every player needs to have an ice bath for 4 minutes after training and then let 1 player get away without fulfilling that requirement – you not only undermine your own authority but your whole team philosophy. Look at Roar in season 2011/12, I remember a stage where they had won something like 36 games in a row. There was a game where they beat Glory 4-0 at home and there was a rift on the field between two of the international players. At that time my Dad turned to me and said that it seemed odd that two players who were both scoring goals playing on a team that was winning in the way that had been to be arguing with each other. At that time there were some issues with the international players that the Roar were going to nominate for the ACL and I immediately felt like there was some rivalry which suggested that there was tension between these players. The Roar lost the next 5 games in a row. This is the type of rift, which decreases the belief in the system and detracts from the philosophy of a successful club.

Being Healthy

I find it really difficult to stomach people telling me that my team is the “fittest”. Let’s face it; the fitness of the teams at the highest level really is negligible as they are all as fit as each other. The key to success is keeping your players healthy so that you can keep your BEST PLAYERS on the field and ensure that they don’t have an excuse not to BELIEVE in your philosophy. I would be telling fibs if I said that I don’t believe that the training techniques that I use are not better than some other techniques because I certainly think that there are some programs, which are inferior to my ideal version of training models. However the majority of this scepticism comes from looking at the program in general and these so-called inferior programs generally are missing major elements, such as true strength, power, and testing or recovery components. So essentially it is more important for a fitness coach to be able to communicate and be consistent with both players and coaching staff to ensure that players believe what they coach says, does the work to get the results and stay healthy.

It does frustrate me sometimes working as part of the machine that is a club because I feel like there are some many little things that can be solved by simply improving the three areas above and to be fair it really only takes the initial investment to get the players, the courage to stick with your philosophy in good times and in bad, and someone who is competent enough to maintain the health of your players from a performance point of view without letting their ego or lack of knowledge get in the way of the other two elements.

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Football Conditioning - IS IT A JOKE??

Football Conditioning Model – Good, Bad or Ugly?

I have been wanting to write a blog for a long time now on the FFA conditioning model which I believe is being run out now as a separate license called something like “Football Conditioning Coach”. My understanding of the course and the qualification is that it is based on the Ray Verheijen football conditioning method and that he had a big involvement in designing and implementing the syllabus. I have always had a very strong opinion on the method, starting out very negative and cynical to a point where I have now come to admire qualities of the approach through a greater understanding of how the approach was intended to work in a team environment. 

My first introduction to the football conditioning method was at a seminar in 2009 which was run by the FFA at which Ray Verheijen presented his method. I was very attentive on the day as I was looking for a nice method to get better control over the skills components of my training sessions with Gold Coast United. I was also aware at the time that there were rumours that this would become the new syllabus and that if you didn’t use this method then you wouldn’t be able to get a job in football as a strength and conditioning coach or fitness coach. My initial impression was that it seemed to have all bases covered in that it accounted for the developmental athlete through to the elite level taking into account injured players and those who required reduced load. On the day I had a number of questions about how the conditioning method would account for players returning from injury and what they were able to do to help get them back to normal training without risk of injury. There was also speculation that the use of GPS units to monitor intensity and distances was irrelevant because they have been found to be inaccurate. In lieu of utilising this equipment the suggested alternative was that the “coach’s eye” and his “feel for the players” was the best indicator of intensity and fatigue. There was also a suggestion that players would run faster if they were chasing a ball – which is why the conditioning model tested speed by chasing a ball.

Another large component of training which I felt wasn’t accounted for was gym sessions – especially for youth athletes. Now I may be controversial in saying this, but if you are a sports scientist and you believe that young athletes shouldn’t be allowed in the gym – go back to university! The benefits of having young kids in the gym are enormous and the earlier they start, the better. I am not saying that you are going to have 12 year old kids squatting 60kg, but learning how to move, through traditional and non-traditional strength training is the most beneficial thing that a young athlete can do to make them a better athlete. If you are a better athlete you are going to perform better in your sport because your body is capable of better quality movements and you reduce your risk of injury through having done appropriate conditioning prior to competition.

So as with any research – I took the sections of training that I thought would be useful out of the seminar and incorporated them into the plan for the next season 2010/11. During this pre-season we basically had a combination of traditional conditioning (intervals & short sprints, etc) combined with Small Side Games Conditioning (SSG) as per the FFA model. Most weeks we had two conditioning sessions; one traditional and one SSG session, with weeks that we had games we would drop the SSG session. In combination with this we had two sessions in the gym focusing on various elements including Stability, Injury Prevention, Hypertrophy, Strength and Power. A common conversation that I have with a lot of people in particular soccer players is that they don’t want to do gym sessions because it will make them big and slow. If it were that easy to get big – there would be no need to have personal trainers!!! Besides you can increase muscle mass and body weight and still get faster – in fact, wouldn’t that be advantageous? To have each player 1-2kg heavier and 0.05-0.15 faster – a bigger, faster team that can compete physically. The point is almost mute anyway because with the amount of aerobic work the players are doing with skills training they generally will find it very difficult to consume the required amount of food in order to increase lean muscle mass.

I would like to discuss three advantages and three disadvantages of the football conditioning method:

ADVANTAGES:

1.     There is a plan that coaches BELIEVE in and as such stick to. The primary cause of injury in pro players is uncontrolled training load. Which is a constant risk for players is session content and duration isn’t tightly controlled.

2.     Players work hard and under pressure in a very specific setting. SSG conditioning closely mimics and even “hyper-mimics” match intensity. Which is fantastic because potentially it can elicit a better transfer from training to game field response. At the same time – you can have players take liberties in SSG as they can hide. They can’t hide from the clock!

3.     Provides better structure to skills sessions so from the sports scientist’s point of view the coaches can be managed better to get a better distribution of training load – therefore preparing the players for the games to a more adequate level.

DISADVANTAGES:

1.     The football conditioning model doesn’t account for all elements of improving athleticism. There is not provision for making player strong and more powerful – which is done most effectively in the gym. There is no provision for improving movement so that players can move with better and with more efficient quality.

2.     The football conditioning method is a “cookie cutter” approach to training a group of players who all have very specific individual needs. I think asking “football coaches” to assume the responsibility for this part of the program can be problematic –because this is not what they are trained for.

3.     One system – not matter what system or how sophisticated it is will work for every player. You need to have an underlying framework and utilize all available resources to get the results for your players.

Teams win games because they have the best cattle who each know their roles and are able to execute their game plan to a greater statistical percentage than their opponents. Strength and conditioning and fitness coaches take too much credit for whether their team wins or loses. The difference we make is the number of players injured at a time and how long they take to return from that injury. Essentially all teams are of the same athletic ability and levels. You don’t need rocket science to get a football player fit enough to play A-League. But if you don’t have a well rounded approach to your training program you will not get the most out of your players on an individual level thus making the task of having them at optimal levels of fitness and injury status for 30-odd games very difficult.

Adrian Cois

[email protected]

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Training Load – getting the balance right!

Training Load – getting the balance right!

When working with any team it my goal to give the coach 100% of his playing group at 100% fitness for 100% of the games throughout the season. The “threehundredpercent” rule if you will! This creates a very delicate balancing act between pushing the players to get them performing at their peak physical capacity while at the same time ensuring they don’t get hurt.

I have heard many superlatives in my time describing the concept of training and monitoring training loads. One of the best is the analogy of filling up a player’s cup. The goal of this analogy is to fill the cup to the brim – at which time the player will have the best chance of performing. The contents of the cup are training sessions – gym, injury prevention, skills, conditioning. When the cup overflows you have done too much and the risk of injury or illness dramatically increases.

This is just an analogy – we don’t actually have a whole row of cups, which are being filled after every training session. We have other ways of determining training load, such as wellness reporting, training load software, physical testing are all examples of techniques we use.

 One of the systems we use for monitoring training is the online software called www.trainingload.com. This software allows us to monitor subjective measures of player’s perceived exertion for various training sessions. At the end of each session – whether it ‘s skills, games, or recovery sessions – we ask them to rate their overall physical and mental judgment of the intensity of the session out of ten. We then multiply this number by the duration of the session to give an arbitrary unit (training load). After having collected data on players for a number of seasons we are able to determine upper limits for total training load values for players at which performance will decrease or injury/illness may occur.

Once we have this data on how athletes are tracking throughout the weeks – we can then make decisions on how we need to alter their training to ensure they stay fit and healthy. This is in my opinion the most difficult part of the equation because it requires the medical team to have discussions and make compromises over training involvement for players with the coaching staff. As a general rule the coaching department always wants players to train more and the medical staff want the players to train less. My job as the conditioning coordinator is get a happy medium to keep the coaches and medical staff happy and the players fit and healthy.

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Gold Coast United Preseason 2011/12

It’s 6pm on a Sunday night in early April when my phone starts ringing. I answer the phone to hear Miron in his disjointed English say “Adrian, we need to meet to discuss pre-season!! Do up your plan and we will meet on Friday to finalise. Ok bye!!”

  With season 7 of the Hyundai A-League starting slightly later in 2011-12 and with Miron wanting to start a lot earlier with pre-season the challenge of getting the team fit, healthy and ready for Round 1 just got harder. The 2011-12 season marks another unique milestone for the club having lost some key players from the previous season and signing some of the countries brightest young talent both from overseas, domestically and from the club’s own youth team. It feels like it did before the club’s inaugural 2009-10 season – a new team!

  We decide that we want to change the way we train the players this season incorporating ball work into our conditioning and adopting a system similar to that of well known football conditioning coach Raymond Verheijen – with a Gold Coast United spin on it of course!!

  Our primary focuses for the upcoming pre-season will be:

1.     Conditioning for injury prevention

2.     Conditioning through small-sided games

3.     Developing speed and agility

  There are some very unique subtleties about how we achieve each of the three above areas throughout the season. I will go through each of these in later blogs – but for now the first step is to design a periodised training plan based on when we have training and friendly matches.

  The challenge is to ensure that we have a very long, slow build up so that the players feel like they are peaking just prior to the start of the season. The downside to having a long pre-season is that you can go too hard too early and by the time the season starts the players bodies are responding like they are a quarter or half way through a regular season.

  The general plan is to start very slowly with 2 ball sessions per week, which include speed, agility and injury prevention training. Each month we will add sessions to the week leading up to some friendly matches against local opposition starting in June continuing through to our first A-League warm up games against Melbourne Victory and Adelaide United. 2011-12 is going to be a big season for GCU. Check out my coming blogs for more detailed information on how your GCU players prepare for games!

  If you want help with your own training email Adrian at [email protected]. 0408 182 569