Unlock the potential of your athletes with strategic testing and tailored fitness programs designed to maximize high-intensity performance.
Headlines
• Insightful Overview: Gain a high-level understanding of testing, assessment, and fitness prescription for athletes, focusing on practical implementation.
• Energy Systems Explained: Learn about the three key energy systems—explosiveness, anaerobic/lactate threshold, and aerobic—and their importance in sports performance.
• Practical Application: Discover how to use assessment data to create personalized fitness programs that enhance high-intensity interval training for field sports.
This is the time of year when many teams and coaches are getting ready for their new seasons, especially for fall sports. Here is brief bit of information regarding testing, assessment, and fitness prescription. Each of these topics is very large, so I will just cover them at a very high level. However, I should give you very practical information that will be useful in your planning and implementation of fitness-based programs.
Most teams do some presearon testing and assessment. Testing batteries are used very frequently, and to me, there are no right or wrong tests or assessments to perform. Assessment that is performed has value in giving you information about the current status of an athlete as long as the test is reliable and accurate. At worst, you have information on the current status of your athletes. You must develop a plan to return them to play if they get injured. There is nothing wrong with this. A better use of the information obtained during assessments is to provide input for fitness programs.
For this piece, I will focus on the approach I have used successfully to train high level athletes in various sports, including professional and international soccer teams – high-intensity interval training. Very few field sports do not require high-intensity bursts followed by rest. In many sports, the level of high intensity being able to be attained and maintained for a period of time can provide a significant advantage. In field sports such as soccer, the capability to perform high-intensity actions is paramount.
A very high level, the body essentially operates using different energy systems. We can break them into three different systems. They have names, but for this example, I will refer to them as explosiveness, anaerobic/lactate threshold, and aerobic. The ability for an hour to perform in any of these three categories is highly determined by the fitness of the energy system that governs these areas. These systems overlap but can and should be trained separately. The good news is that coaching one of the systems will typically also have some effect on one of the other systems, but for best results, training should be specific.
Explosiveness is defined in this piece as anything that occurs in a period of one second or less. An example of explosiveness would be a jump, a quick acceleration, or a change of direction. Capability in explosiveness is typically governed by strength and power capability, in addition to the energy system being used. However, the energy system being used is typically always present.
An example of a glucose/lactate threshold energy system would be any activity that is high intensity and lasts from at least five seconds to anywhere within 45 to 90 seconds, depending on the individual. These are typical running motions that occur during soccer matches. During these activities, players move at maximal intensities but are governed by how much time their bodies can use the system and the recovery necessary to get this system back up and running. The aerobic system is used for activities lasting longer than two minutes and typically allows athletes to perform continuously but at a lower level of intensity than in the anaerobic lactic acid system
The primary focus for most field sports should be developing the second energy system, that is, the ability to repeat high-intensity efforts. Now, remember, there are two parts to this; the first part is the capability to perform high intensity, where intensity is governed by physical capability or strength. This would be like running fast. Science tells us stronger athletes will run faster. Other factors also cover running speed, some of which can be improved.
Performing high-intensity activity is not usually sufficient to play the game of soccer because the player will often have to repeat these high-intensity activities. In addition, they don’t typically have a choice when they have to repeat the activity because the game dictates the necessary actions. However, in any case, there has to be some recovery that occurs between a high-intensity session and the subsequent high intensity. During this recovery, waste products are removed from the muscles that have been worked, and new energy sources are delivered to the muscles.
When we train the second energy system, we are training two things. The first is the ability to maintain high intensity over repeated bouts. The second and most commonly overlooked is the ability to recover between bouts. Recovery is essential because incomplete recovery will decrease performance as time goes on. The best training increases the development of waste products by performing high-intensity action, then allowing some recovery so the body can remove these waste products and deliver new energy, and then repeating.
With the second energy system, there are three goals for improvement. The first is to improve the intensity at which a person can perform the workout bouts. The second is to train the body to remove the waste products generated during the high-intensity bouts faster. The third is to tolerate more waste.
Simply put, the waste products developed during high-intensity exercise are acidic. Specifically, lactic acid is built up. This causes an increase in the pH of the muscle, and there is a specific pH at which the chemical reactions required to generate force cannot occur. Certain pH levels can be tolerated longer with fitness improvement. This allows higher-intensity activity to happen for a longer duration. This is commonly referred to as lactate threshold training. But we don’t have to know the name to use it. The key is to understand that when we push our athletes at high intensity towards the lactate threshold, the training response is for the lactate threshold to increase, so long as we give sufficient work, sufficient recovery, and progress in our prescription.
Returning to testing and assessment and using this for prescriptions, two measures are the most important. The first is the maximum aerobic speed, and the second is the maximum sprint speed. Maximum aerobic speed is the maximum at which a person can run continuously. Continuous means two minutes or longer. Maximum sprint speed is the maximum speed at which a person can sprint. Maximum sprint speed will not be attained unless a person covers at least 25 m, so a 30 or 40 m time trial is sufficient to capture maximal sprint speed. Both measures are speed, and should be expressed as a distance/time, such as yards/sec or meters/sec.
Maximum aerobic speed can be found in a variety of ways, the simplest of which is a continuous run. Essentially, have your players run 1 mile at their fastest velocity and use their time to determine their average running velocity.
In field sports, continuous running is typically accompanied by rapid changes in direction. Directive changes require force, absorption, and generation, affecting the energy system. For that reason, changes of direction are prevalent in field sports a maximal aerobic speed test that involves a change of direction is more appropriate.
I prefer using the 30-15 intermittent fitness test (IFT) (https://30-15ift.com/). This test has been validated to correlate well with maximum aerobic speed during laboratory testing and is freely available online. It is essentially a beep test that occurs within a 40-yard area. Participants run for 30 seconds with changes of direction followed by 15 seconds of recovery. Speeds progressively increase, but they always work for 30 seconds and rest for 15 seconds. There is a velocity at which the player fails, which is known as the IFT Max velocity. The major advantage to this test is that the maximum score translates directly to maximal aerobic speed, allowing prescriptions to be developed very easily. Because at the end of the test, the athlete tool typically goes entirely anaerobic to maintain the test for a more extended period, using 90% of the max IFT velocity as the maximal aerobic speed is appropriate.
From your assessment of each athlete, you have two speeds: max aerobic and max sprint speed. It is now simple to understand that if we have athletes performing at a velocity less than the max aerobic speed, they typically use the aerobic energy system. We obviously can’t have them complete activities at a velocity higher than the max, so activities at velocities between the max speed and max aerobic speed would be velocities that stress the second energy system.
Using this approach, prescription becomes straightforward. To improve the second energy system, athletes should complete repeated sprints at speeds greater than the maximal aerobic speed, but less than the maximal sprint speed. The advantage of this approach is that custom prescriptions can be created based on individual fitness level. The primary concern when dealing with large groups is providing a similar prescription. It may overload some and underload others. Using the testing assessments, it is possible to break your athletes into smaller groups potentially and have the more fit players cover longer distances because they can cover more distance in time to a greater max.
The body adapts to stress; any training is better than none. But in general, a set of 6 to 8 repeats high-speed sprints, with targets of 10, 15,30, or 60 seconds, and rests that are at least as long as the about induration, potentially two or three times longer, work. The distance covered in these sprints is based on the max aerobic speed. As a player becomes more fit, the distance covered should be longer, or the volume of sprints should be more significant. A typical prescription would be to complete sprints at a velocity of max aerobic speed +15% of the difference between max sprint, speed, and max aerobic speed. The coach can change this.
