The Principles of Great Conditioning | Nathan Heaney (Conditioning Consultant)

And you can see there's a big continuum there.

The other thing that's worth touching on is so, again, and this is one thing that I'm building in the new platform I'm building.

So the condition platform is, It's important for people to understand that depending on the sport you work with, some of these sessions are incredibly suited to particular phases.

So this is where I think people get a little bit stuck.

When you think about an off-season phase for a team sport group, fundamentally those sessions are often self-run.

I've seen too many coaches try and prescribe sessions to those groups during that phase and where they think those athletes are a replica of you.

They're going to have a measuring wheel.

They're going to have 30 cones.

They're going to go out and set the session up.

That very rarely happens.

So when coaches prescribe sessions that require that sort of onerous level of setup that a coach will do, what do you think the athlete does? They don't do it.

They opt for something easier.

So this is where the challenge for like an off-season phase is finding sessions that are physiologically effective and meet the criteria that you're trying to achieve.

but also maximize compliance.

So I've spent a lot of time trying to work out, well, when you think about scaffolding and building out an annual program, what impact do the phases have within that? And that's the basis of condition that I'm building.

The idea will be that a coach will be able to answer a series of questions and they'll basically be, an authored program will be generated off the back of the responses for the team.

and the phase that they're in.

So I think that's important to note because I find that that's where so many coaches get stuck, which is, again, sort of, for me, that's been the impetus to try and create something that is a bit more user-friendly and a bit more scalable for coaches so that I can, you know, you can help more people in this domain.

That's a really good point around making it coach-friendly, but also a step further, athlete-friendly, particularly in the off-season phase.

Around like, OK, I want you to do this distance and this time.

I remember a girl I was working with, she was an inter-county camogie player, and the SC gave her these runs to do.

So she was going to do it after school, in, get the cones and going down to the park now to set them out.

And she was stepping the distances out.

And she could have been five meters off per run, you don't know, whereas something a bit more continuous potentially at an RPE or something like that could have been every bit as effective but more easy for her to set up.

Absolutely.