Planning the In-season Microcycle in Soccer Part 7: Paraskevas Polychronopoulos Case Study

Previous parts:

1. Planning the in-season microcycle in soccer – Part 1: Complexity
2. Planning the in-season microcycle in soccer – Part 2: Mark Williams Case Study
3. Planning the in-season microcycle in soccer – Part 3: Mick McDermott Case Study
4. Planning the in-season microcycle in soccer – Part 4: Thoughts on Recovery “mini-block”
5. Planning the in-season microcycle in soccer – Part 5: Thoughts from the Archive
6. Planning the in-season microcycle in soccer – Part 6: In-season strength training for soccer

Paraskevas is strength and conditioning coach from Greece where he works for an amateur team. He was kind enough to share his template.

I asked Paraskevas why do they have the hardest session on the 2nd day after the game where fatigue is at it’s peak. Here is his rationale:

The gym that we used this season is a local one that was occupied by many other soccer clubs. The options were Tuesday-Thursday- Saturday, or Monday – Friday – Saturday.During the pre-season, I gathered subjective measures of all the players and the majority felt better performing a training session 2 days after the game. I know that most of several physical aspects (Sprint, Strength) are decreased and others are increased (DOMS, CK) on the 2nd day after a game, but I took into consideration the opinion of the athletes and the availability of the gym space. Surprisingly, there were very few injuries during the in-season. Sorry for the long post, but I hope I gave you a general idea of my logic…

We can all see from the example by Paraskevas that contraints are the one that dictate the real-life solution, and that athletes can adapt to mostly anything thrown at them, even if it is sub-optimal from ‘perfectionist’ standpoint.

Programs cannot exist in isolation of context, nor they can be evaluated without taking context into consideration. Sometimes things like gym availability dictates what can be done and when.

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