The expert throughout is Mick Beunen, a former Belgian international who has been the physical trainer behind the Red Lions since 2010. He recorded this masterclass with us in November 2020, by which point Belgium had gone from around ninth in the world to the top of it.
Ask most of us when a player's fitness gets exposed and we'd say the last ten minutes. Mick Beunen would agree, and then show you the receipt.
At the 2015 World League he was tracking Felix Denayer, one of Belgium's outside midfielders, on what he calls high metabolic load distance: sprint distance and explosive distance added together. Not total distance covered. Denayer was hitting close to 1,800 metres a game, almost two kilometres of high-intensity work. And his highest output of the entire tournament came in the last game, the final against Australia.
"He actually even produced his highest level, the last game of that tournament."
Mick's explanation for that is where it gets useful for the rest of us, because it isn't really about Denayer's engine.
"If you have strong athletes, they can continue to fire at high speeds, up until the last quarter or up until the last game."
What follows isn't a programme to copy. Mick's is built for full-time internationals with GPS units on their backs. It's the thinking underneath it that travels, and he was happy to translate that down to club level whenever coaches asked.
TL;DR:
Mick puts strength underneath everything, but never trains it on its own. Always with speed, always aimed at movements rather than muscles. Load moves in waves, three weeks building and one week backing off, and the easy week is where the change actually happens. Almost all of the physical work sits inside the hockey session. And what he measures isn't how many metres a player covered, but which ones. Three ideas below.
The full session, Physically game ready with Mick Beunen, is on The Hockey Site.
Why Mick starts with strength
Worth pausing here if you read Glenn Turner last week. Glenn led with the aerobic engine, and was pointed about it: being able to run matters more than your five-rep-max. Mick starts from the other end entirely. Both have won things at the top of the game, and I'd rather show you both than pretend there's one answer.
Mick's reason for putting strength at the bottom takes one sentence: "You can still recruit your motor units at the end of the game, and you can still reproduce that speed." That's where he thinks matches get decided. The last quarter, or the dying minutes of one.
But notice what he pairs it with, every single time.
"Strength is crucial, but always in combination with speed, and focused on movements and not on muscles, on coordination."
Movements, not muscles. And nothing repeats: "Not one week is the same. Not one strength session is the same as the other." Two strength sessions a week is his floor, and he rarely goes under it.
Now the club version, which he gave himself. A coach asked him about a squad where one player is a professional, one is a student in lectures all day, and one has a desk job. He didn't reach for a programme. He said individualise, then this:
"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."
And when a coach in the UK asked what players could do with the gyms shut, he got concrete. Resisted sprints first, using a tube or a hill of about 7%, then progress to normal sprints. Sets of around six. A game asks for at least twenty sprints, he reckons, and some players make forty to forty-five depending on where they play.
So the question isn't how to copy the Red Lions' gym work. It's what "strong" actually means for the hockey your team plays, and how short a strength session can get before it stops being worth doing.
Build in waves, and protect the easy week
Here's where most pre-seasons come unstuck. Week one arrives, everyone's keen, and the squad gets absolutely smashed. Then we wonder about the hamstrings in week three.
Belgium runs three-to-one, sometimes two-to-one: "We have three weeks of a gradual overload of our players, and then we have one deload week. This deload week allows for changes, mostly on your muscular level, on your neural level."
The load climbs, then steps back so the body can catch up. Before Rio they deloaded eight to nine days out, so players arrived fresh rather than fit but flat.
What I like is that Mick doesn't sell this as settled practice. He says it's "something that I don't always see in international hockey, or at club level either." It's his approach, arrived at over ten years, not the sport's consensus.
His version runs on measurement, and he's straightforward that it does: GPS since 2010, heart rate alongside it. At club level the honest substitute is counting your sessions and being truthful about how hard they really were. Less than he has, considerably more than most of us do.
So: when did you last plan an easy week on purpose, rather than get one by accident?
Put the physical work inside the hockey
This is Mick's deepest conviction, and probably the most useful thing here for a coach with two ninety-minute slots a week.
"We mostly integrate our physical skills in the hockey, whether it's the aerobic side and the anaerobic side and the agility part. It's all integrated in the hockey session."
In practice that's small-sided games above 85% of heart rate, short work periods, limited rest, several sets. Conditioning that also happens to be hockey.
It's also what he calls dual tasks. Agility work where a number gets called, or fingers held up, or a colour shown, and that's what decides which way the player goes. "We do a lot of dual tasks, just to connect the movement to your motoric memory." Hockey is a game of constant choices, and every choice gets executed with the body, so he trains the two together.
His standardised week, with the caveat that "our weeks are never the same": Monday, integrated strength. Tuesday, hockey with speed and agility built in. Wednesday, hockey. Thursday, a lighter hockey session plus the second strength block, separated by at least three hours so the two don't interfere. Friday, rest. Saturday, about fifteen minutes of short intermittent work: 4v4 at forty-five seconds on and forty-five off, plus 9v9 in two-minute halves. Sunday, play.
Then he brought it down a level himself, which is the bit I'd pay attention to: "If you bring it back to a club session or club trainings, you would for sure probably only do one hockey session on the Tuesday, but still have three sessions at least, and preferably four, to prepare your club game on the Sunday." The pre-match priming work comes out at club level too. That one's for established internationals.
Last thing, and he's strict about it. What you measure. "Overall distance is not really something you look at. You really look at the quality." For a midfielder that's sprint distance plus explosive distance. For an attacker, mainly explosive, because the job is leads and pressure rather than forty-metre counters. His international benchmark is blunt: "If an attacker hasn't gone to 800 explosive meters on an international game, then he didn't do enough."
Don't take that number to your club team. Take the thinking: decide which efforts genuinely matter for each position in your side, and watch those.
One more habit worth copying, which is his willingness to say no. Asked whether he uses heart rate variability, he said there's plenty of research on it, "I don't use it, because it's not conclusive enough." A physical expert at the top of the game, turning down a fashionable metric because he isn't convinced yet.
Take it to your next session
Decide what "strong" means for the hockey your team actually plays, then put one short strength block somewhere it can realistically survive the week. Mick's floor is two a week, and short is fine.
Look at your next four weeks and find the easy one. If there isn't one, that's your finding.
Turn one running block into hockey: small-sided, high intensity, short rests. Then add a number or colour call to a single agility drill, so the sprint happens on a decision instead of a whistle.
None of those are Mick's session plan. They're the three decisions his approach asks you to make.
Watch the full masterclass
The article above is the whole idea, yours to use. If you want to see how Mick actually runs it, the full session goes further: the real GPS slides from the World League and Rio, the strength and agility work on video, and around twenty minutes of Q&A with club coaches. The first 12 to 15 minutes are free for everyone, so you can have a look before deciding.
The full video sits inside a Coach subscription, 99,99 euro for the year, or 9,99 euro a month if you'd rather start smaller. Pre-season is when this stuff actually matters, so if you're building your physical base for next season, it's a good place to start.
Watch Physically game ready in full here:
#sharetheknowledge
