Microcycle Planning for Team Sports

Planning a microcycle looks simple on paper. In team sports, it usually isn’t. Games land on different days, players fall into different functional groups, and half of your week disappears before you even start. That’s exactly the mess this presentation tries to unpack.

The video digs into the gap between textbook planning and real coaching. It looks at top down and bottom up approaches without turning it into theory for theory’s sake. Instead, it shows why long term plans often fall apart once you get into the season and why starting from what you can actually do today makes more sense. From there, it moves into the real-world pieces coaches deal with every day. Starters. Reserves. Non travel players. Injured players. All of them on different timelines, and all of them shifting the way the whole week needs to be organized.

A big part of the presentation focuses on mini blocks. Recovery. Loading. Taper. These three pieces shape everything. Their length changes. Their order changes. Their purpose stays the same. If you’ve ever watched your weekly plan collapse by Wednesday, this section will feel familiar.

There’s also the question of what to push and when. The video explains how to think about strengths and weaknesses across the week and how the balance shifts as match day approaches. It covers individual versus collective work, timing of different training components and which combinations play nicely together. Nothing is presented as a perfect recipe. It’s more a way of thinking that helps you avoid interference, handle the chaos and get more out of the days you actually have.

Later in the talk, things get even more practical:

Simple heuristics for deciding what really needs to be done.
How to deal with uncertainty instead of fighting it.
When to microload.
When it makes sense to push one quality harder
How a basic Kanban board keeps staff aligned and makes life easier for everyone.

This framework isn’t theory. It comes from working with squads that change every week and solving problems that don’t care about your perfect plan. That’s why it resonates with coaches who’ve been through a few seasons and know how unpredictable things get.

The video doesn’t pretend to offer magic answers. It gives you a model that helps you think more clearly and react faster.

The following concepts are coverd in the presentation:

Top-Down versus Bottom-Up planning
Functional Groups within the team
Mini-Block and their variations
Planning for microcycles of different length
Distribution of Strength versus Weaknesses work
Distribution of Individual versus Collective work
Probabilistic planning of the training components
Optimal time to develop certain qualities
Optimal combinations when developing certain qualities
Saturated/Sequential versus Distributed/Parallel approach in planning of the development of qualities, and concept of microloading
Heuristics of what needs to be done, from uncertainty perspective
Heuristics of when certain qualities should be developed taking mini-blocks into account
Much more that includes managing the Kanban boards of the functional groups, agile periodization and dealing with planning and working in teams sports