Supertraining

The below may be of interest:

Tapering and peaking for a major tournament
By Iñigo Mujika

Extracts from from humankinetics:

It seems that professional football (or soccer in the United States) players 
competing for their clubs in the lead-up to major international tournaments 
such as the World Cup, and therefore having reduced opportunities to taper, are 
among those most likely to underperform (Ekstrand et al. 2004). Most major 
international tournaments take place at the end of a long club-level 
competitive season. In an attempt to elicit players' peak performance, some 
nations decide to advance their domestic competition calendar to allow the 
players to rest and rebuild their fitness to compete for their national teams. 
A different approach is to delay the end of the domestic season so that the 
players are still in a competitive shape when they join their national squad. 
Both strategies have pros and cons, and the scarce scientific literature 
available is not conclusive regarding the optimal approach to peaking for a 
major tournament.

Danish national football team
Bangsbo and colleagues (2006) recently described the preparation program of the 
Danish national football team for the 2004 European Championship. After the 
club season, the players rested for 1 to 2 weeks before preparing for the 
championship. The preparation lasted 18 days divided into two 9-day phases.

The amount of high-intensity exercise was similar in both phases (i.e., 
training intensity was maintained), whereas the total amount of training was 
reduced in the second phase (i.e., training volume was tapered). This is in 
agreement with previous tapering recommendations based on studies from 
individual sport athletes (Mujika and Padilla 2003a).

The authors emphasized that because of large individual differences among 
players in the amount of high-intensity work performed during the tactical 
components of the training sessions, a careful evaluation of individual 
physical training load is essential, even during training time not specifically 
dedicated to fitness development.

French national football team
Ferret and Cotte (2003) reported on the differences in preparation of the 
French national football team in the lead-up to the World Cups of 1998 and 
2002. The former World Cup campaign saw Les Bleus taking home the valued 
trophy. Four years later, an almost identical group of players returned home 
sooner than expected, after a disappointing qualifying round without a single 
victory and not scoring a single goal. According to these authors, in 1998 the 
team had enough time and biological resources prior to the qualifying round to 
further develop the athletic qualities of the players through two solid 
training phases followed by a 2-week tapering phase, characterized by 
high-intensity training situations (friendly games) and a moderate training 
volume, which allowed players to eliminate the negative effects of training 
(fatigue) while maintaining the adaptations previously achieved. In contrast, 
in 2002 all players were only available to the national team 8 days prior to 
the beginning of competition, and medical and biochemical markers indicated 
that most players were severely fatigued after the club season. In those 
conditions, the technical staff could not carry out a development training 
phase followed by a taper to peak the physical qualities of the players prior 
to the World Cup (Ferret and Cotte 2003).

The reports just described suggest that an ideal approach to peak for a major 
international tournament would start several weeks before the first game, with 
an initial recovery after the club season, followed by rebuilding, and 
finishing with a pretournament taper characterized by low training volume and 
high-intensity activities.

Unorthodox approaches
Nevertheless, there are examples of successful unorthodox approaches that 
challenge these ideas about optimal preparation. For instance, the Danish 
national football team unexpectedly won the 1992 European Championship after 
the team was invited to compete 10 days before the beginning of the tournament, 
because of the last-minute exclusion of Yugoslavia from the championship. By 
then, half the Danish players had already finalized their participation in 
various European leagues and had been out of training for 3 to 5 weeks, whereas 
the other half were still competing in the Danish domestic championship. All 
players were only available to the coaching staff 6 days before the first game. 
The team's success has been partly attributed to the fact that players were not 
physically and psychologically exhausted, as is often the case after long and 
tough domestic and international club seasons followed by a long national team 
preparation and a demanding international tournament (Bangsbo 1999).

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Jamie Carruthers
Wakefield, UK