The goal of every sports performance coach is to improve their athletes athletic performance and capabilities. The goal of every athlete during a training session is to put in the necessary work to improve their physical prowess.

A big part of ensuring the training session is as effective as can be boils down to planning, preparation, and organization. Organizing an effective training session begins with establishing a goal.

With a goal for the training session in mind, the preparation and planning to conduct the session for the coach to get the most out of the athlete is primed and ready to go.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Establishing A Goal

Planning The Training Session

Organizing The Training Session

Sample Workout

The Bottom Line

Establishing A Goal

Goals are important. Goals give you a north star for direction in training. Depending on the athlete and sport, goals may vary drastically depending on a plethora of factors.

Take for instance a varsity wrestler heading into their senior year of high school. The athlete is quite strong and incredibly explosive. The athlete, at a bodyweight of 70 kilos/155 lbs is able to bench press 120 kilos/265 lbs, back squat 165 kilos/363 lbs, clean 100 kilos/220 lbs, and has a vertical jump over 30 inches.

With numbers like those, the wrestler isn’t in the strength realm of weightlifter or powerlifter type of numbers, but they aren’t shabby. Actually, the numbers are extremely respectable from a strength and explosive standpoint.

The athlete is quite fast too. They are able to run a 20 yard shuttle in 4.22 seconds with minimal training in the drill. The fact that their change of direction capabilities are pretty legit bodes well for their speed as well.

However, this hypothetical wrestler is coming off a .500 season of wins and losses during their junior season. With strength, speed, and explosive numbers like these, how can that be? Simple. The hypothetical wrestler lacks a gas tank. No engine. They putter out after scrambles and late in matches.

Clearly, the wrestler needs more and better endurance.

Enter the goal setting: improve the athlete’s endurance with a combination of high-intensity interval training and long slow distance, zone 2, cardiorespiratory endurance training, while maintaining levels of strength, speed, and explosiveness.

Planning The Training Session

From the destination of the goal, the coach can then plan the training session accordingly.

Sticking with our hypothetical wrestler entering their senior season of varsity wrestling who needs endurance training while maintaining their baseline levels of strength, the plan will need to bias toward endurance training.

This is probably a great time to state that every sports performance coach needs to be focusing on developing athletes’ strength, explosiveness, speed, and endurance in line with the demands of the sport being trained for.

Strength can be developed through a mixture of technical coordination lifts, like the snatch, clean, and jerk, and their derivatives. Strength training can also come in the form of absolute strength exercises, like the squat and bench press and their variations. Also utilizing bodybuilding protocols for accessory movements and hypertrophic gains is helpful in this category as well.

Explosiveness can be developed through the use of plyometrics and technical coordination exercises. Of course, general gains in strength help with explosiveness as well.

Speed will improve with strength and explosiveness gains, but will also benefit from straightforward locomotive training that develops acceleration, change of direction, and top end speed. Drills like the 20-yard shuttle and L cone drill are great for change of direction, sprint starts and hill sprints help with acceleration, and running starts, 40 yards dashes, 100 meter and 200-meter sprints help with top end speed.

Which leaves endurance, what our hypothetical athlete needs the most of. Endurance training primarily consists of zone 2 and high intensity interval training. The need to build up mitochondrial volume and the red blood cells' ability to deliver oxygen, and the muscles to use the oxygen, is the hallmark of solid endurance training.

That all in mind, planning the training session will revolve around the goal and take into account developing strength, explosiveness, speed, and endurance.

Usually, coaches will have weeks or months to develop these aspects. That said, this hypothetical will be planning a single session of training, not a whole week or cycle.

If you want something like that, the Peak Strength training app is a phenomenal resource.

For our hypothetical athlete, we will want to start off with a warm up, something to target the muscles to be used, get the heart rate up, and the neurological system firing.

From the warm up, coaches will want to start with a technical coordination movement. Something like a power clean or two block snatch can function well in this spot.

Because we are going to do a full body workout for this hypothetical day, the next movement will be a bench press supersetted with weighted pull-ups (it is a wrestler) to fulfill the absolute strength component.

Looking at this workout, we have covered improving explosiveness (the two block snatch), strength (bench press and pull ups), and speed (snatch again–helps with acceleration). The speed component isn’t direct, but suffices.

We can finish off the lifting portion of the session with some accessory work (more strength) but focus on high, high reps. The high volume of reps in sets will set the athlete up for sarcoplasmic hypertrophy work, while developing localized muscle endurance. Since wrestlers need grip strength, we can plan something like Zottman curls, Farmer’s carries, and plate flips as a nice finisher.

However, we also want to have some direct cardiovascular work to develop endurance. If we say our hypothetical athlete did interval training the day prior, having completed 5 rounds of 1:40 row/:20 seconds of rest, we can be assured they had some VO2 max work completed. That info handy, we will want to attack some Zone 2, long duration work.

For the long duration work, we can have them run 10k/6.2 miles or pedal on a bike for an hour holding a target heart rate in a Zone 2 range. As a coach, the use of the stationary bike is nice because it beats up the joints less, something that needs to be taken into consideration for the totality of planning and programming.

Organizing The Training Session

The training session is organized in a manner that goes from the most technically demanding, explosive movements to the least technically demanding, least explosive movements.

The training session is organized in this manner so the body is most fresh when it is performing the most intense movements at the highest speeds. That is why the technical coordination movement, the two block snatch, is at the beginning.

The technical coordination movement is then followed up by the absolute strength exercises, which are compound lifts in the form of bench pressing and weighted pull ups. The absolute strength exercises are then followed by accessory movements, which tend to be single joint, isolation style of exercises.

The workout then concludes with the longest portion of the workout, but also the least intense. Remember, the endurance workout is supposed to occur within a zone 2 heart rate based on the day’s prescription. The time frame is long, but the intensity is controlled. The controlled intensity and the heart rate data ensures the movement is being performed at the proper pace–the workout is not speed dependent but biometrically responsive.

Sample Workout

The Bottom Line

Organizing an effective training session takes planning and preparation. It demands understanding a system that will best help athletes achieve their training goals to impact their sports performance positively.

An effective training session is one that is organized in a manner to ensure that the attributes of strength, explosiveness, speed, and endurance are being developed in some capacity. Not all need to be developed on the same day, in the same way, or through the same manners, but all do need to be addressed and taken care of in relation to the sport being trained for. Using such perimeters as a guide are necessary to organizing and creating an effective training session. .

So if you’re an athlete or coach looking to have a solid organized training session that takes into account strength, explosiveness, speed and endurance with training, head over to peakstrength.app and download Peak Strength to reap the benefits of an organized training session.

Later.