Football is classed as a complex intermittent sport due to its physical demands of requiring both aerobic (with oxygen) and anaerobic (without oxygen) components (Morgans, Orme, Anderson & Drust, 2014) or in more simple terms endurance and strength/power movements! Therefore, it doesn’t take you as a coach a sports scientist to tell you that training both aspects of endurance and strength/power would be beneficial to your players!
Concurrent Training
Concurrent Training is a method of training which allows you to train both endurance and strength/power aspects together (Hickson, 1980), making it ideal for sports such as football to develop all aspects needed within match-play. Although the idea sounds great, practically it can be hard to implement due to researchers developing the knowledge of what has become known as the interference effect (Wilson et al., 2012). In simple terms this means that the two training methods interact causing a reduced adaptation to training (players getting fitter and stronger slower!). In footballing terms, this could be seen daily as you as coaches try to target both strength and endurance adaptations as you know both are important for successful football performance.
Watch this video to find out more!
Still need a bit more information to help you understand, why not read our blog on Concurrent Training below!
Whether your players are out on the pitch training endurance aspects or in the gym improving their strength and power the body responds with an ongoing stress response, however the type of response is dependent on the type of training.
Endurance Training promotes a large stress response in the body from multiple areas, one of which is called AMPK [remember this for later] (Mahoney, Parise, Melov, Safdar & Tarnopolsky, 2005). These individual responses to exercise form a larger whole-body response which activates the most important part of this process, a transcriptional coactivator gene called PGC-1 alpha (Terada, Kawanaka, Goto, Shimokawa & Tabata, 2005). Although this sounds complicated, just think of this as the ‘thing’ that allows your desired adaptations to training to occur! Without this activation your players training adaptations will not occur!
Strength Training promotes its own stress response and much like endurance training has a very important central protein called mTOR which increases in amount during exercise. (Atherton et al., 2005) Again, don’t be scared by the strange name, mTOR is involved in cell growth and therefore within hypertrophy strength training making your players muscles bigger!
Everything sounds great doesn’t it! However, research into molecular physiology has found that the stress responses can interact with each other when performing training concurrently, which in turn results in a reduced training adaptation. Here’s why, remember AMPK, one of the stress responses to endurance training, this protein blocks mTOR from working effectively (Hickson, 1980; Hawley, 2009). Why is this a problem? Well, if you were to get your players to take part in a strength session in the morning and then take them out on the pitch for a more endurance based session then as soon as your players endurance stress response is activated mTOR will be blocked and your strength adaptations will be reduced (Wilson et al., 2012).
Research suggests that following a bout of endurance training AMPK takes between 4-6 hours to return to a baseline level in which it will not affect your strength adaptations (Fyfe, Bishop & Stepto, 2014). It is also suggested that force production can be significantly reduced for up to 6 hours after endurance training (Hawley, 2009). So, what does this mean me for me as a coach? Well, ideally you would program your endurance sessions in the morning maybe 9-11 am and your strength sessions 5-7 pm, to allow the 6-hour window for the endurance stress responses to return to baseline. However, this is what would be done in an ideal world, whether this is practical or not for your players with your own constraints of time and facilities would have to be decided by you as a coach and your other staff.
It is important to highlight that this does not mean that if you don’t follow this guidance that your players won’t improve their endurance or strength/power. Players will still progress and display both adaptations however the extent to which they adapt with be reduced. Some research has suggested that when using High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and Strength Training in a concurrent methodology that interference effect is not present (McGawley & Andersson, 2013), therefore by incorporating HIIT protocols as your endurance based exercise may help to reduce the effect of interference and maximize your players adaptations.
Football Science 