Periodization Fitness Training - A Revolutionary Football Conditioning Program

Book excerpt: Javier Mallo is currently a fitness coach at Real Madrid. He has previously been a fitness coach at Manchester City (2 years) and Atletico de Madrid (4 years). In this book, he explains how to create, organise and structure your football specific fitness training sessions. Periodization is the systematic planning of fitness training. This book helps you solve the problem of organising the training loads in order to achieve the highest team performance possible at the different stages of a season. Within this book we provide fitness training which includes practices that develop all the attributes needed for an individual and a team, such as warm ups with and without the ball, conditioning, technical, tactical, competitive small sided games, attacking, defending, the transition from defence to attack and attack to defence. The fitness practices in this book are very creative and aim to replicate competitive matches, so the players get used to making quick decisions and solving problems that arise during competition. Fitness coaches need to have a profound knowledge of the game, as all the practices in a session have to come together in a common way of thinking related to the tactical organisation of the team. It may be possible that in the following years the term fitness coach will lose all its value and will simply be replaced by coach or assistant coach.