The Best Programme Is the One That Fits the Week

You can write what looks like the perfect programme on a Sunday night.

The gym timings make sense. The running loads are planned. The progressions are clear. Everything fits perfectly into the week.

Then Monday arrives.

Training runs longer than expected. Two players are carrying injuries but never said anything until that evening. Tuesday becomes a harder technical session than planned. Another player picks up a niggle. The manager changes Thursday's session. Someone has their Leaving Cert coming up, another player has worked a night shift, and suddenly the perfectly planned week looks very different.

That is S&C planning...

I think one of the biggest lessons you learn with experience is that programming is not just about knowing what an athlete needs physically. It is about understanding what the training week can actually tolerate.

There is always a temptation in S&C to protect our piece of the programme. We have the gym session we want to deliver, the high-speed running exposures we want to hit, or the training volume we believe the athlete needs. And those things might all be correct in isolation.

But the athlete does not experience training in isolation.

They experience the gym, the pitch, the technical and tactical work, the matches, their job, their studies, their sleep, and everything else happening around them as one combined week.

That is why a great programme in theory can become a rubbish programme in practice.

Sometimes good planning means reducing the gym volume because the pitch session was harder than expected. Sometimes it means moving something to another day. And sometimes it means accepting that the athlete will not get everything you originally planned that week.

The ability to adapt without losing sight of the long-term goal is an important skill for an S&C coach. Of course, constantly changing everything is not the answer either. Athletes still need consistency, progression, and enough exposure to create adaptation. But there is a difference between having a clear plan and simply being stubborn.

The more I coach, the more I think good programming is less about creating the perfect week and more about making good decisions when the week stops being perfect.

So, next time the week changes, the session runs over, or an athlete turns up more fatigued than expected, maybe the question is not...

“How do I make sure we still complete the programme?”

Maybe it is...

“What does this athlete actually need from me today?”

Food for thought - Michael