Football Rehab – part 3

After discussing the difference between a Quality and a Quantity session we now have to place the different sessions on a certain day, within the week. As mentioned in the previous earlier there are differences between a quality session and a quantity session. Every movement/action you execute in a rehab session must, at first, be improved before you train to maintain. If you go from, let’s say, 80% speed of movement/actions to 90% this will be trained within a Quality session first. To ensure the rehab player is able to work on a higher speed of actions he needs to be totally fresh. Freshness is the most important aspect within a quality session. Freshness is at it’s highest at the beginning of the week, if of course the player is doing everything right off of the pitch. This would mean that the Monday will be a quality session. To be able to execute every action within the quality session at his relative new 100%, he needs maximum recovery between the movements/actions. 

One of the aspects of a Quantity session is that accumulating fatigue is not a problem in these sessions. Since the rehab player had a quality session on the Monday (figure 1) Figure QL QN session week before he will most probably enter the quantity session with some fatigue. Fatigue is allowed since he will be working on maintaining movements/actions for longer and therefore it will be unavoidable. To achieve this he needs to execute his movements/actions with minimum rest between movements/actions. The most logical day to plan the first quantity session in the week would be on the Tuesday. As we know a player competing at a high level in football normally trains several times a week. To optimally prepare the rehab player to return to play he also has to train several times a week. Until now he has trained a quality session on the Monday and a quantity session on the Tuesday. It would not be logical to plan a quality session on the Wednesday, because of the aforementioned rehab principle of freshness. Another quantity session at this time would also be a poor choice. Remember that this injured player still hasn’t returned to his football fitness which he had developed before the injury. He is only working at his relative 100% speed of movements/actions.

The most logical choice for the Wednesday would now be a Recovery session. Depending on the stage of the rehab process you could also opt for a day off (figure 2) Figure QL QN session week. Since the player now has recovered from a quality and a quantity session in the beginning of the week, he can now again start a fresh on the Thursday to train a new quality session. The recovery session/day off increases the chance of full recovery which then in turn, increases the chance of improving the movements/actions in the session. The whole cycle now repeats itself. After the Thursday quality session, a quantity session will follow on the Friday. Again this is followed by a recovery session on the Saturday. The Sunday is a day off so the player coming back from an injury, will start the new week totally fresh. In the beginning of the rehab process you may again opt for an extra day off, in this case the Saturday to almost guarantee total freshness on Monday.

If players do not train more then, for example, twice per week a different solution must be considered of how and where to plan both type of sessions. The example mentioned above must therefore not be copied literally. Different external factors give us different solutions. Readers may ask themselves, but what will the workload be for the player that will be exposed to either a quality or a quantity session? This is a topic which will be discussed extensively later on. An important point to make here is that the workload must not increased twice within a week.

Thanks for sharing.