As professionals in a high-performance industry, we like to think of ourselves as pirates. We all start with nothing, roaming the seas of the sport science ocean and over time stealing ideas, accumulating knowledge, concepts, and viewpoints that we align with. We take from others to benefit and create our identity; we are high-performance scavengers.

Over the course of the upcoming season, we will be releasing a monthly blog that will cover trending topics. The topics will pivot around three central themes, with each theme allocated four talking points. These themes are as follows:

• Data lead approach to sport science in football
• Evidence-based practice for return to play in football
• Youth football.

Today we will start our first theme of a data lead approach to sport science in football, with a focus on tactical periodization.

What is tactical periodization?

Tactical periodization states that training should include all tactical game principles as envisioned by the head coach¹. The game model – a specific manner in which you play in matches, also known as principles of play – should guide the training process from the beginning.

Tactical periodization uses tactical principles as the vehicle in which all aspects of football are trained. This means that technical, physical and psychological components of training are developed through very specifically designed tactical training sessions².

This ensures that the specificity of training remains high. Specificity within a training session means that all the principles that are central to the coach’s game model are present.  The greater the specificity of training sessions, the greater the transfer of practice into the game, and therefore a greater chance of a successful game model.

 

How does the sport scientist aid the coaching department in tactical periodization?

As the coach has the role of creating and implementing the game model, we as sport scientists have the important role of assisting the coach in attaining the game model.

This requires us as sport scientists to have a firm understanding of the physical demands of football matches, and more importantly understand the physical demands imposed by training.

If the head coach has a specific principle that he or she wants to train, we as sport scientists need to be able to identify the physical demands of this principle, quantify it, and understand how we can manipulate it.

As a key factor in tactical periodization is having all three additional factors present in the coach’s tactical drills (physical, technical and psychological), we as sport scientists need to guide the head coach in manipulating the drill to ensure that the drill has the desired specificity and the relevant intensity.

The concept of specify further carries over into how we arrange the demands of the training week. Having clearly identified principles for each day of the training week, allows the sport scientists (with their understanding of the demands of training) to foresee how the athletes could respond to these training demands. We would not want a coach to work on a certain principle a few days before a match and over-load the team due to coach being unaware of how demanding the training session was.

The understanding of football and the demands it imposes physically on your players can drive and encourage conversation with the head coach.

Once the head coach understands that we are not put in place to be the handbrake or the individual who tells the coaches which player can train and who can’t, but rather a tool in the coaches toolbox to aid in the ability of the coach to have a higher level of coaching specificity in their training.

The head coach will be more inclined to small changes in his principles to ensure that the players are well prepared – tactically, physically, and emotionally for match day.

1. Mendez-villanueva A. Tactical Periodization : Mourinho ’ s Best-kept secret ? Tactical Periodization : Mourinho ’ s best-kept secret ? Tactical Periodization : a new soccer training approach. ResearchGate. Published online 2017.

2. Bordonau J, Villanueva J. TACTICAL PERIODIZATION: A Proven Successful Training Model.; 2018. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004