So January has come and past, and hopefully we have gotten into the habit of writing the date with 2019 at the end! All athletes and fitness enthusiasts should be back into the full swing of their training regime, working towards their goals for the new year. But what does your training plan look like for the rest of the year?
In the last blog series, we discussed the importance of goal setting, and by now you should have had time to formulate different types of goals for this year and beyond (read here if you missed this series:https://www.thescienceofstriking.com/mental-training/goal-setting-for-2019-part-1-types-of-goals/). In the last series we discussed some basic concepts of a testing battery (read here if you missed this series:https://www.thescienceofstriking.com/training/what-does-your-testing-battery-look-like-part-1/), and hopefully you have had a chance to collect some basic training data, or at least analyse in some more detail where you are at in terms of your current performance, compared to where you want to be. This should be correlated with an honest assessment of your performance in the previous year, further honing in on areas that need to be improved in order to reach greater levels of success.
The task now is to set a training plan that maximises your valuable time, and works towards achieving your goals for the year.
For any athlete, the training plan needs in part to be based around the competition schedule for the year. Most athletes will have one event that serves as the most important of the training year, and it is this event for which the athlete will want to peak and maximise their performance potential. Athletes should then use other events as a means to check the effectiveness of current interventions, but understand that overall competition performance may be slightly sub-optimal, and it takes a disciplined athlete and coaching team to acknowledge this and view competition preparation in the correct context.
In the case of a karate competitor, for example, or any other athlete involved in a tournament situation whereby there are multiple competitors in a specific division, the tournaments may (and should) be fixed 12 months in advance so the athlete has adequate time to prepare. Most kickboxing, boxing, and MMA bouts are different, in that a single match must be arranged between two athletes, and the process of organising this far in advance is unrealistic. Thus, the training cycle needs to be structured to accommodate for this.
The next two posts will discuss an example of each of the above scenarios, each with different physiological focuses.
A full framework of training planning is featured in the science of striking, available in both hard-copy and kindle formats (https://www.amazon.com/Science-Striking-Comprehensive-Physical-Preparation/dp/1729586821/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1543575646&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Science+of+Striking+Sam+Gilbert)
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