Periodization

Helpful guidelines for monitoring physical loads within exercises

Similar to warm-ups, training activities need to have specific physical prescriptions to ensure players are getting the most out of the exercise without increasing the risk of injury. While I’m no expert in the area of periodization, I have collected a few resources over the years and wanted to finally share them.

Variables

There are certain dials that coaches can adjust to alter the physical load within a training exercises. The biggest dials are: duration of activity, recovery time, and field space. But how these dials are changed depends on a lot of different factors: the number of players participating, where we are in the season, the weather/environment, the age of players, etc.

Generally speaking, players only need to have their sports seasons periodized after they’ve gone through (or are going through) their second stage of maturation, i.e. puberty. This is usually around age 12 for females and 14 for boys. I’m sure this is old hat for most coaches, but there is a wide age range of when young people go through puberty so it’s important to understand where players are in their physiological development and individualize training as much as possible to ensure no players are overworked.

And while I say only players who have completed puberty should have periodized seasons, that’s not to say that young players who haven’t entered their second maturation phase are immune to high physical loads. Use common sense, listen to players, and don’t force players to do more than their bodies can handle.

Activity to Rest Ratios

The graph below is a great tool to guide your decision making. It’s not exhaustive or a panacea to all of your periodization problems, but it provides a good structure to base decisions off of.

It’s easiest to explain the graph through an example. Let’s say you run a 1v1 exercise (black text on bottom). Using data from the adult game, on average, the longest a 1v1 moment exists is for 6 seconds. So players participating in a 1v1 exercise should – ideally – only play for 6 seconds (red box with white text). After their 6 seconds of play they should receive anywhere between 60-75 seconds of rest (green box on top). So, contrary to the 4th Principle of Good Coaching, this can be a good way to consciously incorporate the use of lines to give players sufficient recovery time.

Not every exercise will or should be even numbers though (which I’ve written about before). When players participate in an uneven game, such as a 4v3, the work and recovery time should be tailored to the team with the fewer numbers. In this 4v3 example, players should play for 30 seconds and then rest for 90 seconds or so.

Using Subjectivity

Players know when they’re tired and have the ability to communicate so. Now self-reported fatigue scores may not be the hard incontrovertible data that sports scientists prefer – they’d rather know about heart rate variability and blood lactate levels – but for youth coaches like us, self-reporting is a quick and easy way to gather useful information.

Self-reporting is easy to implement. After an exercise ends, have players tell you or an assistant coach how hard they thought the exercise was on a scale from 1 to 10; one meaning they could do it all day, ten meaning “Please God, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

It’s worth mentioning that responses should be made as privately as possible. A player who struggles with an exercise may give a lower score if they hear their teammates had an easier time with it.

In broad strokes, there are 7 different session difficulties that can be used. The first difficulty level has the lowest physical load and usually last between 20-45 minutes. It’s generally used as a recovery day session where players can stretch and increase blood flow to damaged muscles. It takes about 8-12 hours to properly recover from, and after every exercise within this recovery session players should report a difficulty level of 2 or 3.

The highest difficulty, Level 7, is a match which last 90 minutes or longer and can take up to 4 days to recover from.

Therefore Level 6 is the highest difficulty a true training session can have. Players should participate in high difficulty exercises for anywhere between 85-95 minutes (not counting the recovery time that corresponds to the number of players & activity time) and be allotted 72 hours to recover.

3 Helpful (and Broad) Guidelines

There are three helpful rules to consider when designing exercises with proper periodization in mind. First, when getting to higher number exercises (such as 4v4 and up), each player should have 10 yards of length and 6 to 7.5 yards of width. This means a 6v6 game (including goalkeeper) should have a field length of 60 yards and width of about 40 yards. This corresponds to the 11v11 format where most field are about 110 yards in length and 70 yards wide.

Another good rule – again starting at the 4v4 format and up – is to have one minute of play for each player. So a 4v4 game should be four minutes, 5v5 should last five minutes, 6v6 is six minutes, etc.

The last guideline is to just be considerate of your activity to recovery ratios for small-sided games (1v1 – 3v3 exercises). The Activity to Recovery Table is helpful to use, but there are times when you can’t give players 60 seconds to recover after playing for 6 seconds. Interval training (which is essentially what soccer is) usually uses a 1:5 work to rest ratio, and it’s possible to squeeze that ratio even further down to 1:2 as the season and player fitness levels develop, but it’s important that players are then given ample recovery time after the exercise ends.

These guidelines don’t perfectly align with the information listed above but these are general truisms to follow, not strict rules to obey.

Short Aside on Pitch Size

The size of the playing area is a surprisingly complex part of the training session environment, but it can be broken down into two categories of thought: smaller playing areas and bigger playing areas.

Small Playing Area

In some ways having a smaller pitch creates higher physical loads. There are more changes of direction and more technical actions being completed by the players which makes exercises more demanding, but this is dependent on the quality of players being able to keep the ball in a smaller area.

Generally, smaller areas can be used to develop technical skills because it creates a pressurized environment and gives more opportunities to players to execute skills. If you want to develop maximum technique, use smaller areas with longer recovery times to give high quality repetitions. If you want players to be able to complete more technical actions, i.e. technical stamina, then have them play in smaller areas with fewer recovery breaks.

Large Playing Area

But if you want to develop a sturdy baseline of aerobic fitness then you need to use larger playing spaces. Players may receive fewer technical actions but they will have greater space to cover. Relying only on small sided-games or full-sized fields will create unbalanced players who are not sufficiently strong enough across all areas. A good coach will determine which exercises to use based on the developmental needs of their players and understanding in which ways their physical systems need to be stressed or rested to increase strength and decrease injury risks.

When in Doubt, Do Less

Here’s the best advice I can give to any coach: err on the side of doing less. You’d much rather have a player who gets tired after 70 minutes than a player who can’t play at all because they’re injured. Young bodies are sensitive and can pick up predispositions to injuries that will nag them the rest of their lives. So when in doubt, do less.

Wrapping up Periodization

This is not an extensive piece on periodization. It only focuses on the influence of individual exercises within a training session, not how physical loads compound and effect each other over longer periods of time. But this is merely a general primer to help coaches better tailor their exercises to ensure athletes are not being overtaxed or understimulated. Ensuring the health of young athletes is the most important credo for youth coaches and periodization is a crucial component of achieving that objective.