3 keys for planning an effective training session

Everyone know how to plan a training session. Haven’t you heard?

Everyone at your gym. Every athlete that plays sport. Every physio or ortho doc after their two-hour Sport Science module. Every slightly fitspo account on Insta.

Everyone knows how to train people!

Actually, no. Being in the health, fitness, and sport spaces doesn’t equip people to become experts in sport science, and - as is demonstrated on social media every second - means in no way whatsoever that a person can write good, healthy, and beneficial training plans.

The thing is this: training science is not that hard. Writing workouts is not difficult, but it does require a certain level of understanding the human body, of purposeful planning, and of big-picture load management.

What does all of that mean in practice?

It means knowing a few things well before you start throwing shit into spreadsheet columns and clicking “sort randomly”.

In the athletic training space, however, I see some pretty common pitfalls in workout planning, and I outline them below with some humble recommendations for improvement.

Above all - and truly none of this article matters if you don’t have this first - every session should have a clear goal to be achieved through the workout. If it doesn’t, start planning from there.

MAKE THE WARM-UP COUNT.

Can I be honest here?

Most warm-ups I see are either unspecific exercises thrown together for no particular reason or they’re too much, too long, too much fluff, and essentially a complete workout before even starting the workout.

You know, CrossFit “EMOM/AMRAP 10 minutes of 3 exercises” kind of workout-warm-up.

The warm-up phase should be specific to the content, context, and goal of the training session it leads into.

You’re sprinting? Cool. Why are you doing the same warm-up you would do for a barbell day?
You’re lifting? Why do you need a pre-match-style warm-up?

Make sure the content of the warm-up adequately prepares you (or those you are training) for what you are training, and that it fits the context.

If you have time constraints, the warm-up should appropriately fit within the programmed session to maximize time. If you have space or resource constraints, take these into account. Be realistic.

Example: if it’s the dead of winter and it’s been cold-raining the last few days, there is no reason to do a series of warm-up exercises on the ground. However, that doesn’t mean that entire warm-up series should be cut out and forgotten, simply because the ground is cold and wet. Rather, it should be adapted to fit the circumstances and the athletes.

And, lastly, nobody should be dead-tired after a warm-up.

Warm? Yes. Ready? Yes. Mentally prepared? Yes. Physiologically active? Yes. Nobody should be drowsy and cold. There is room for focus, intensity, and a little sweat in the warm-up, and half-assing it will get you nowhere.

But a warm-up has failed if athletes are over-tired afterward. That reduces the effectiveness of the training session itself. Let the warm-up serve its purpose of adequate preparation, keep it specific, applicable, short, and sweet.

And then get down to business.

ORDER: POWER/SPEED, THEN STRENGTH, THEN CONDITIONING.

As with most things that require planning in order to be effective, there is an order of operations to exercise selection. Picking a few exercises, rolling the dice to decide reps and sets, and jamming it all together just doesn’t work out well, especially if you want specific results.

Because specific results require specific adaptions which require specific stressors.

As a general rule, the primary emphasis of your session should occur first. Perhaps that seems obvious - after all, you probably wouldn’t do 5 accessory exercises and then try to max your squat at the end of a session, right?

But this gets muddled when having to plan in multiple focuses, like speed, strength, and conditioning in one session.

Part One: power and speed components always come first.

Power exercises (think jumps, throws, Oly lifts, speed/ballistic lifts and other plyos) and speed work (sprinting, drills) require more technique, more energy, and more intensity than strength exercises or conditioning work. To get the most benefits out of power and speed work, athletes need to be fresh and able to give 100% effort to every single repetition.

This requires readiness, and it requires rest between the work. Otherwise your power sets become sloppy and your speed work becomes an ugly conditioning run, neither of which help you (or your athlete) become faster or more explosive.

Part Two: strength is second.

Although strength training can be exhausting and requires form and intensity to a degree, it is less exhausting to the nervous system as explosive work. It also requires less rest between sets, and the volume and load are extremely different from what is required to get results from speed and power work. Thus, you can still perform well in strength sets following explosive work*. You can’t, however, perform explosive work optimally after a full strength workout.

*This excludes certain kinds of contrast training - that’s a topic for another article! However, contrast sets with speed/power + strength couplings still occur at the beginning of the workout, so…

Part Three: condition last (if at all).

Something we often forget or misunderstand is that conditioning is the easiest part. It takes time and a lot of reps to get strong. It takes effort to get fast.

But you could almost condition on accident - that is, you condition while playing your sport, while training, while lifting, and while sprinting to a certain degree. And, since you likely get so much of this anyway, it doesn’t need to be the focus of the session. It can go last.

Besides, the goal of conditioning in its simplest form (for most coaches) is to continue to work under fatigue… which makes conditioning a prime candidate for the end of a session, where an athlete is already fatigued (thus requiring less conditioning to cause fatigue in the first place) instead of up front, fatiguing you for speed/power and strength instead.

Plus, there’s a lot less form and technique required for conditioning, and you can’t really mess it up. If you have to do it, stick the pain cave at the end.

(Or don’t and just go home!)

MORE IS JUST MORE, NOT BETTER.

In a world and an industry that thrives on excessiveness, more isn’t more when it comes to training. More can actually be dangerous.

When prescribing volume (# of reps or distance) and load (intensity, weight), do the math in advance. Don’t just throw something together because the rep scheme seems nice. Be aware of how many reps per exercise, per direction, and per body part are being completed and know why that exercise/load/volume will help you (or your athlete) achieve the goal of the session.

Also, don’t worry if your session doesn’t have fancy exercises. It’s truly better to have a well-executed, 100% effort workout with five exercises in it than a sloppy, tired workout with ten. The athlete walks away better physically and mentally from the first one than from the latter.

So avoid buying into the “more is better” concept, even if you want to do more. Always ask “why” and “will this bring me closer to my goal in the long term?” before assigning more.

In fact, try to go for less. It pays off.