The organisation of your training week is key for performance. We can't go 100% every day, for 12 weeks. Here is what you should be doing to enhance performance.
This is probably one of the most important parts of your training results, yet I believe is vastly under utilised. The organisation of your training week is key. I've seen so many fighters who just go 100% in every session, for the whole of camp. They don't even realise they feel fatigued until they experience a camp full of energy and recovery.
The body can not keep pushing maximally, we need to have sessions and days that vary in intensity. What are some of the key points you need to consider?
Key points
You should have 3 hard days per week max. Any more than this and you are probably not recovering. Strength and fitness is not about what we do in sessions, it's what we can recover from outside of sessions.
You should have a full day rest each week. Usually, we put this in on a Sunday.
You should have another light day dedicated to recovery. This could be something like technical pads in the morning and a recovery run in the afternoon.
Traffic light system
Start with looking at what you currently do. Grab a pen and paper and write down your week training schedule. Score each session out of 10. Green = 1 to 6. Orange = 7 and 8. Red = 9 and 10.
How many reds do you have? I'm betting a majority is here. How many greens? You are now aware of how you are training and can begin to organise your week around the key points above.
Sparring would be red, tech is probably a green. Start to see how you can get a training week that has a mix.
High low method
This is something I really like, simply because for the fighter it's easier to stick to and understand. Ideally, we would have sessions throughout a day mixed between Red and green but sometimes this isn't possible, or isn't followed. When we are scheduled to have a green session, it becomes a red and we are back to square one.
For the trainer and fighter, rather than saying this session go easy, this one go hard, we can make it more simple.
The high low method uses the traffic light system still but grouping by days instead. For example, with one group of my fighters, Tuesdays and Thursdays are Red days. Each session is hard. In between, on a Wednesday, we'd have a green day.
It is easier for the athlete and trainers to know this day we go hard or this day we go light. It's more likely that plans will be followed.
Round up
Training week plans are key as I've mentioned. I'd highly recommend sitting down and planning yours out. This periods of recovery will allow you to have a much more productive camp. We need to focus on camps as a whole rather than a day, think longer term.
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