Flat on gameday? Fix your training week, not your fitness

It is Thursday night in November. The session was good. Lots of running, a long small sided game at the end, everyone sweating and happy, and a coach driving home thinking that was a proper night's work. Then Saturday arrives and the team is half a step late on everything. Nobody is injured. Nobody is unfit. They are just flat. The first tackle is a fraction slow, the first three passes are a metre off, and by the third quarter the shape has gone. The team did not lose because they were undercooked. They lost because they were cooked on Thursday.

Most coaches have lived that weekend. And most of us know the opposite version too, the team that gets carefully managed all season, never does anything hard after October, and then cannot hold intensity in the last fifteen minutes of a March playoff. Both are conditioning failures. One is a load failure, the other is a stimulus failure, and in-season is where both of them happen.

Here is the awkward truth. Pre-season is well covered. Periodisation is well covered. What almost nobody talks about is the long middle, the twenty odd weeks where you have two sessions and a match, players with jobs and exams, and a fixture list that never gives you a clean block. This piece is about that middle. Not about adding conditioning to your week, but about getting conditioning out of the hockey you are already doing, and about the small amount of separate work that genuinely earns its place.

Designing the Optimal Field Hockey Training Week is the structural backbone. Xavi Haro builds the week backwards from match day and classifies every single exercise by its physical profile, which is the discipline that turns everything else in this article from good intentions into an actual plan.[7]

Hockey conditioning made simple is the closest thing we have to a manifesto for in-season conditioning at club level. Glenn Turner is direct about the fact that hockey teams do too much of the wrong hard work and almost none of the easy work that makes the hard work possible.[1]

Physically game ready gives the integration argument from the top of the sport. Mick Beunen's whole model is physical work living inside hockey sessions rather than beside them, with an overload and deload rhythm that a club coach can borrow at a fraction of the volume.[2]

Injury Reduction Training Methods is the injury prevention pillar, and it is also the only source that tackles in-season conditioning head on, including what happens when you take load away entirely.[3]

Mastering Physical KPIs in Field Hockey covers hockey specific intensity and, crucially, how to see it without technology. Wouter Blondeel's low budget testing answers are the most practical thing in the library for a coach with a stopwatch and nothing else.[4]

Practice Session Design is the session design pillar. Fede Tanuscio's refusal to "train to train" is exactly the discipline in-season conditioning needs, because unplanned sessions are where accidental load comes from.[5]

Periodisation for Club Coaches is the planning piece, and the one non video source here. It already does the work of translating elite cycles into a two session club week, so it is the bridge the rest of this article stands on.[6]

Start with what in-season conditioning is actually for. It is not for building capacity. That window closed in pre-season. In-season, you are trying to hold onto what you built and, more importantly, make sure your players can still produce it in the last fifteen minutes of a match that matters.

Wouter Blondeel is blunt about where games are decided. "The last fifteen minutes, sometimes the game is lost. Why? Because the guys can't hold the repeatedness, and it's intense."[4] Mick Beunen says the same thing from the strength side. "If you have strong athletes, they can continue to fire at high speeds, up until the last quarter or up until the last game, which is the most important game mostly most of the times in your tournaments."[2]

So the in-season target is clear. Not more fitness. Repeatable intensity, available on demand, at the end. That reframes everything, because the thing that destroys repeatable intensity is not undertraining. It is accumulated fatigue arriving at the wrong moment.

There is a useful way to think about this that changes how most coaches read their own week. Injury and breakdown risk tracks much more closely to how sharply load changes than to how much load there is in absolute terms. What a squad can tolerate is set by what it has been doing over the preceding weeks, not by what looks reasonable on paper. A hard Thursday is not dangerous because it is hard. It becomes dangerous when it sits well above the recent norm, or when it lands on legs that have already had a heavy weekend. This is why in-season conditioning is a smoothing job. You are not trying to find the perfect session, you are trying to avoid the week that looks nothing like the four weeks before it. Two moderately demanding weeks in a row will do more for a club team than one brutal week followed by a fortnight of nothing.

And this is where the honest self assessment comes in. Ask yourself where the hardest physical night of your week currently sits. If the answer is the session closest to the match, you have found your problem, and no amount of extra conditioning will fix it. Beunen's international week loads the middle and empties the end. Intensity sits on Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday is deliberately less intensive, Friday is rest, and Saturday is a short sharp intermittent primer before a Sunday match.[2] You cannot copy that volume. You can absolutely copy that shape.

Xavi Haro, who works with RC Polo de Barcelona and the Spanish national team, gives the cleanest version of why placement comes before content. He opens every week with three questions. What is the main objective of the week, which is the most demanding day of the week, and what is the physical profile of every single training task.[7] In a team sport the first two answers are already settled. Match day is the objective and match day is the peak. Everything else is built backwards from it.

That backwards logic gives him three blocks. Recovery straight after the game, then an optimisation block where the real physical work lives, then a taper so players arrive fresh rather than merely rested.[7] His day after the match is a full day off, and only then does load come back in.[7] You do not have five or six slots to spread that across, but the sequencing still holds, and the second question is the one most club coaches never ask out loud. Which of my two nights is the hardest, and is it in the right place?

Haro's split is worth knowing even if you can only borrow half of it. Four days out from the match he runs the strength oriented night, accelerations, decelerations, changes of direction and body contact, delivered through small sided games from 1v1 up to 8v8 on small pitches, high intensity in short bouts with real recovery between actions. Three days out he flips it, bigger areas, more players, longer reps with shorter rest, repeated high speed running and sprints.[7] Then it tapers into sharpness, and nothing that leaves a mark.

Compress that into two sessions and you have your week. The far session carries the strength flavoured work, small areas and repeated efforts. The near session carries sharpness. If you only get one midweek session, run the small area work early in it and finish on context rather than on volume.

The club translation is the one already laid out in our own periodisation piece. Two sessions, one system. The session further from the match carries the load, more reps, more running, more contacts. The session closer to the match carries the sharpness, game context, set pieces, decisions, lower volume, sharper finish.[6] Flip those two and you will feel it on Saturday.

There is a reason elite programmes obsess about the match as a load event and club coaches often treat it as the thing that happens after the week. For most club players, the weekend match is comfortably the highest intensity effort of the seven days. Nothing you set up on a Thursday will replicate it.

That has two consequences. The first is that you need less separate fitness work in-season than you think, because the match is doing a large part of the job. The second is that the match should be telling you what your sessions are for. Fede Tanuscio's loop is the cleanest version of this. Review the weekend, design the session from what the game exposed, retest it the following weekend.[5] He is talking tactically, but it works physically too. If the shape collapsed in the fourth quarter, that is a repeat-effort problem, and it tells you what your mid-week game format should be.

Matt Eyles adds an important warning about the other direction, the temptation to just remove load when the fixture list gets heavy. "A week off, especially a week off in season, you've got a bye round or something and you give the athletes a week off, it's probably gonna do more harm than good."[3] His point is that deloading should mean reducing, not deleting. Take a session out, shorten the blocks, drop the volume, but keep the exposure alive. Because as he puts it, "A session missed is a session missed. A week missed strength training is a week missed. You'll never get that back."[3]

That is the in-season tightrope in one paragraph. Too much and you flatten Saturday. Too little and you detrain, and detrained players get hurt.

Haro is also clear that the whole logic gets upended when fixtures pile up. In tournaments, the loads you would normally spread across a week are compressed into a few days, and week to week club routines simply cannot be ported into that context.[7] Club coaches meet a small version of this every time a midweek cup game lands. When it does, stop trying to run your normal week at reduced volume. The fixtures are now doing the loading, and your only jobs that week are recovery, sharpness and keeping the small non negotiables alive.

The way out of the tightrope is to stop thinking in weeks and start thinking in short blocks with a built-in release. The pattern that works is the same one used to build the ability to cope with pressure generally. Establish the thing, raise the intensity of it, add real competitive demand, then deliberately back off, then go again. The backing off is not a reward or a soft week, it is the part of the cycle where the previous three weeks actually get absorbed. Coaches who run permanent moderate intensity never get the absorption, which is why their teams feel the same in March as they did in October.

Here is the single most useful idea for a coach with limited pitch time. Most of your in-season conditioning should not be conditioning. It should be hockey, designed so that the physical outcome happens as a by-product.

Beunen is explicit that this is how the Red Lions do it. "We mostly integrate also our physical skills in the hockey, whether it's aerobic side and anaerobic side and agility part. It's all integrated in the hockey session."[2] The mechanism he describes is not complicated. Agree with your staff what intensity you want, then build small sided games that deliver it. He talks about playing for a set amount of time above eighty five percent of heart rate, achieved through small sided games with a limited duration and a limited amount of rest in between, repeated over several sets.[2]

Strip out the heart rate monitors and the principle survives perfectly. This is really just constraint design applied to a physical outcome instead of a tactical one. You do not instruct a physical quality into existence, you set up the task and the space so that the quality has to emerge for players to succeed. You control the conditioning stimulus of a small sided game with three dials, and none of them require technology.

The compression point deserves a moment of its own, because it explains why a small area game is such good value in-season. Shrinking the space and the numbers does not just raise the physical demand, it multiplies the number of meaningful actions each player has to solve. Players get more touches, more decisions and more accelerations per minute than they could ever get in a full pitch game, which means the same physical stimulus arrives with a large tactical and technical bonus attached. For a coach with two sessions a week, that dual return is the whole argument. You are not choosing between conditioning and hockey, you are choosing a format that pays twice.

Haro's task profiling is the elite proof of exactly this, and it might be the most useful part of his session for a coach with cones and no tracking units. When he compares training tasks through GPS data, small area games consistently produce the highest accelerations and decelerations, while large area formats produce the high speed running and the sprints.[7] A two on two counterattack and a nine on nine drill are not two flavours of the same thing. They are two different physical sessions wearing the same kit. His actual method is unglamorous and entirely borrowable. Write down every exercise you use, classify each one by its physical load, then allocate it to the day where the recovery cost fits.[7]

Do that with a pen for your own last month and the audit answers itself. Mark each game format strength or endurance, then check which of them have been sitting closest to your match. Haro uses tracking to validate the plan rather than to write it, which is the right order for a club coach too. The classification is the thinking. The data, if you ever get it, only confirms whether you were right.

Eyles makes the same point from the other end, and he is scathing about how rarely coaches use the first dial. He notes that coaches often like to play in a small field for whatever tactical reason but never really give players the opportunity to open up high speed over bigger fields, and his instruction is direct. "If for whatever tactical reason you do need to only play on small fields, well, then make sure you're getting your sprinting in somewhere else. If you're only playing on big fields, make sure you're getting your change of direction, your agility exposure in somewhere else as well."[3]

So the audit is simple. Look back over your last month of sessions and ask what size the games were. If every game was a quarter pitch 4v4, your players have had a month of change of direction load and almost no high speed running exposure. That is not a fitness gap, it is an injury risk, and it will show up as a hamstring in February.

Integration does most of it. It cannot do all of it, and the exceptions are worth being stubborn about.

The first is genuine sprinting. This is the one thing a hockey session almost never delivers, because players can hide. Glenn Turner is very good on this. "If you're doing interval running and you do 300 meters and rest two minutes, 300 meters or you're doing a game with a stick. I promise you it's not the same. If you're doing a hard session, you can get away with hiding somewhere and doing something. But if you're just running and you can't hide."[1]

Eyles treats this as an absolute. "Speed once a week. Absolute nonnegotiable. I will make sure that at least once a week in training, we're opening the athletes up and allowing them, giving them the opportunity to sprint."[3] And he is clear about why it belongs in an injury prevention conversation as much as a conditioning one, referencing the idea that sprinting is a vaccine for the hamstrings. Small regular doses build tolerance. The alternative is that the only time a player's hamstring sees top speed is the weekend, which is exactly when it tears.[3]

The detail that matters most, and the one coaches get wrong, is intent. "Fast running is not sprinting. There has to be intent there if you want to expose the hamstrings in particular, to those sorts of forces. So seeing someone run across the field at 80% is probably not enough."[3] Blondeel found the same thing and solved it with competition, because if you simply ask players to sprint all out, most of them will not. Make it a race, give them a time, put two or three players against each other with something on the line, and suddenly you get the real thing.[4] He also notes the flip side of the injury argument, that regular maximal sprinting is itself hamstring protection, provided it is built up properly.[4]

The volume required is genuinely small. Eyles works within a modest band of high speed running inside a fifteen to twenty minute warm up, and says he very rarely goes below about a hundred metres of it when that is the focus.[3] Blondeel is equally restrained on frequency, never doing more than two speed sessions a week, because if you are doing more than that it means the players were not truly at a hundred percent, and he keeps true top speed sessions short but really intense.[4] This is a handful of efforts after a proper warm up. It is not a fitness session, and it should never leave the legs heavy.

The second exception is deceleration and braking. Eyles thinks this is the most overlooked physical quality in field sports, and points out that a lot of knee and quad problems happen in the deceleration moment rather than the acceleration one. His fix is unglamorous, having athletes run to a point and stop dead, and better still stop dead on a command.[3] Blondeel builds the same quality in the gym through eccentric and isometric work, and he is worth reading on why. A player who cannot brake cannot change direction well, and the same deficit that slows the turn is the one that raises injury risk.[4]

The third exception is a minimum strength dose, and the club version of this is far smaller than coaches fear. Turner's whole argument is that this is a ten minute job done consistently, not a programme. "I'd stick some body weight strength in the two sessions before it. I just tell them to turn up 10 minutes before, have a little bit of fun. You can do partner push ups, you can do all that kind of stuff." He describes it as short blocks, twenty seconds on and ten seconds rest, a couple of minutes each of push ups, squats and lunges, and then the honest bit. "If you do it one week or you do it three weeks and they do it for another six, it's not going to really help. But if you did it consistently for all season, make it really easy for them where they don't feel like they're doing much, you'll get good benefits out of that."[1]

Beunen, from an environment with every resource available, arrives at almost the same advice for club coaches. "Try to integrate physical skills in your hockey session, and for sure try to include strength in their routines. And you can already do relatively short strength sessions, with reasonable gains also."[2]

Blondeel's contribution here is the most club friendly of all, because isometrics need nothing. An isometric lunge hold on the pitch, with a teammate adding a little resistance. Pushing hard against the fence that surrounds every hockey pitch in a split stance for ten seconds at a time. Calf work standing on the edge of a bench beside the pitch, where he notes plenty of players cannot hold twenty seconds.[4] Eyles reaches for the same tool for the same reason. Bodyweight and isometrics are great, and a thirty second lunge hold with nothing but your own weight will produce a response.[3]

None of this needs a gym, a slot, or a negotiation with the head coach for pitch time. It needs the ten minutes before training, every week, from September to March.

And this is the part where most seasons quietly fail. These non negotiables are all important and none of them are urgent, which means they are the first things to get squeezed when the fixture list gets loud or the session runs late. The fix is scheduling discipline rather than willpower. Put the sprint exposure and the bodyweight block into the plan before you fill in the hockey, not after, in the same way you would protect anything that only pays off later. Small doses laid down repeatedly beat any amount of good intention, because the benefit here comes from accumulation rather than from any single session being impressive. Ten minutes done twenty five times is a season. Forty minutes done twice is nothing.

If there is one idea in this whole library that would change the most club seasons, it is this one, and it is the least glamorous.

Turner's diagnosis of hockey culture is worth sitting with. "We do way too many small games and shuttles and things like that in hockey. So you might train five days a week and you're doing the same movements and you're putting your body under so much stress and pressure and it doesn't make sense because you need to work hard and you need to recover hard."[1] He is describing a specific and very familiar failure, where every session is moderately hard, nothing is truly hard, nothing is truly easy, and players live permanently at seventy percent.

His remedy is easy aerobic running, and he frames it as a recovery tool rather than a fitness tool. "Everyone's hates running slow but the benefits are huge and you recover better so you can train better the next day, and then instead of dipping you're actually getting that off season a little bit or getting fitter throughout the season without getting injured."[1] Note what he is claiming. Not that easy running makes you fit. That easy running is what makes it possible to train hard on the days you want to train hard, which is the entire in-season problem.

He also gives the exact prescription for a coach who sees the team twice a week and cannot add sessions. "This week it's a 3k run. I don't care about your time. So this is really important. I need to see you do the run. I don't care about your time."[1] The removal of the time is the whole trick. The moment you time it, players race it, and it stops being easy running and becomes another hard session you did not plan for.

There is a broader version of this worth holding onto, which is that the sport should not occupy every corner of a player's week. Total focus while you are on the pitch, then genuinely off, is a healthier and more productive model than a permanent low hum of hockey obligation. Coaches who fill the gaps with extra sessions, extra videos and extra homework tend to produce squads for whom hockey has become a chore by February, and a squad that quietly resents the sport will never give you a fourth quarter. Protecting the off days is a performance decision, not a kindness.

And the corollary, which is the sentence to write on the back of your hand. "Don't give them shuttles to do at home and things like that. Give them the easy runs to do at home, give them the push ups and that before the training."[1] Homework should be the easy stuff and the short strength stuff. The hard stuff should happen where you can see it and control it.

There is a culture win hiding here too. Turner describes what happens when a group starts posting their runs. It builds a feeling that everyone is working even outside the normal sessions.[1] For a squad of players who cannot all get to every training, that shared thread can be worth more than the running itself.

The last piece is monitoring, and you do not need equipment for the version that matters most.

Most coaches look for fatigue in the wrong place. They look for players doubled over. Turner argues the real signal arrives much earlier and looks like a technical problem. "What I see as a coach is you didn't make that extra step to make the chop on your forestick, or you meant to pass it to someone and you missed by a meter because you're starting to fatigue and you're starting to not move your body weight. So you see that way earlier. Then you will see the player really struggling out there."[1]

This is enormously useful, because it means your in-season conditioning feedback loop runs on things you already watch. Trapping errors creeping in during the last block of a session. Passes drifting a metre. A player who normally makes the second run stopping at the first. That is your load telling you something, two weeks before it becomes a hamstring.

It also carries a hard instruction about session order that many coaches get backwards. Reps taken in a fatigued state do not just fail to help, they actively groove the fault, because the pattern being repeated is the broken one. Skill circuits build in one direction and are stubborn to unbuild, so a technical block tacked onto the end of a hard conditioning night is worse than no technical block at all. Put anything you genuinely want players to learn early, while the legs and the attention are fresh, and let the conditioning happen after it. The corollary is that when quality visibly collapses in a session, the right move is to stop that block rather than push through it. Nothing useful is being deposited at that point, and something unhelpful may be.

Eyles offers the same logic with a number attached, for coaches who want one. Ask players how hard the session was out of ten, multiply by the duration, and track it. It gives you a crude internal load figure and, more usefully, it tells you when one player found a session much harder than everyone else.[3] He also flags the pattern to watch out for over a longer horizon, unexplained fatigue, slower sprint or jump performance, disrupted sleep and players getting sick.[3]

If you want an occasional objective checkpoint, Blondeel's answers cost nothing. A standing broad jump or a triple hop for leg power. A stopwatch over ten metres for acceleration. Eight sprints with a short fixed rest, timed, to see whether a player holds speed across repeats or falls away. A plank hold for trunk stability. A lunge with the heel down and the knee travelling past the toes for ankle mobility.[4] The repeated sprint one is the most relevant to this article, because holding speed across efforts is precisely the quality that decides fourth quarters.

There is one more discipline that belongs here, and it is a discipline of restraint. A single flat afternoon is very weak evidence. Small samples throw up extreme results far more often than we expect, and the coach who rebuilds the whole plan after one bad Saturday will be rebuilding it again in a fortnight. A team that has been sharp for a month and is dreadful once has probably just been dreadful once. Look for the pattern across three or four weekends before you touch the structure, and treat one poor performance as information rather than as instruction.

One warning on in-season testing though. Blondeel is honest that in-season is awkward for this, because there are simply a lot of games and the calendar keeps moving.[4] Pick one or two checkpoints across the season, not a monthly testing habit that becomes its own load.

You will not run an international programme on two sessions and a match. You do not need to. The thing that separates the team that is sharp in March from the team that is flat in November is not the amount of conditioning. It is whether the coach decided in advance which nights were hard, which nights were easy, and which nights were neither.

Both of these are sketches. Adapt them to your pitch time, your squad and your fixture. The structure is the point, not the minutes.