Fitness

The Australian Elite Football Academy (AEFA) can provide professional football specific fitness training on both a one to one as well a team or group basis.

Time-motion analysis (TMA) as reported on https://www.footballscience.net revealed that football requires players to repeatedly produce maximal or near maximal sprints of short duration with brief recovery, which will highly tax the anaerobic endurance and result in temporary fatigue.^[1]

As a result anaerobic endurance performance seems to be a crucial physical attribute/characteristics in football.  Anaerobic endurance is generally trained with repeated-sprinting and coaches also refer to it as repeated-sprint ability (RSA).

We believe that the decision about the amount of training session per week must be determined from a coaching philosophy point of view as well as a sport science.  We feel that 2 sessions during pre-season should apply sufficient stimuli to develop, while 1 session during in-season might maintain anaerobic endurance.

Furthermore, it is also important to distinguish between the level of play, as players at a higher level can tolerate more training compared to lower level/amateur players.  Similar to the training frequency per week, the duration seems debatable due to philosophy and schedules.  From our experience we also believe that 4 weeks is enough to increase anaerobic performance.

From a practical point of view anaerobic endurance could possibly involve not only the physiological (anaerobic system) but also some technical aspects (such as heading or finishing) and possibly some tactical aspects (such as defending with a lower amount of players compared to opposition). As a result, depending on the set up of the exercise, it might be possible to combine multiple training goals.

These sessions, conducted by our Head Coach, must be booked with AEFA at football@aefootballacademy.com.au.

^[1] https://www.footballscience.net/training/anaerobic-endurance/