[5-min read]

In the previous article, Shane Malone provided a breakdown the physical demands of Gaelic Football, the impact of the rule changes and the tools available to you in pre-season. Regardless of any rule changes, pre-season training represents the opportunity to progress the physical conditioning of your athletes relative to the game the team is trying to play. Planning this progress should be the first priority.

Pre-season conditioning presents a familiar challenge for both strength & conditioning and sports coaches: how to improve fitness without unnecessarily increasing injury risk or compromising player availability early in the season. The answer is in your planning. In this article, we’ll discuss 5 guidelines to help you plan your pre-season conditioning.

Pre-season Conditioning #1: Building Capacity

At its core, pre-season conditioning is about increasing a player’s capacity to tolerate work. Gaelic Football is a high-volume running sport layered with repeated high-intensity efforts. If players are exposed too quickly to the peak demands of training or match play, injury risk increases before meaningful adaptation can occur.

Research examining training load and injury risk consistently shows that athletes who develop higher chronic workloads are more robust, provided those loads are built progressively (Gabbett, 2016; Windt & Gabbett, 2017). In other words, fitness itself is protective – but only when it is developed gradually.

From a physiological perspective, the early phases of pre-season should prioritise cardiovascular adaptation. Improvements in aerobic capacity support faster recovery between high-intensity efforts, greater tolerance of total training volume, and support improvements in running technique that provide a stable platform on which later speed and repeat effort qualities can be layered.

Pre-season Conditioning #2: Volume Before Intensity

One of the most common errors in pre-season planning is introducing high-intensity running too early, before sufficient volume tolerance has been established. While speed and repeat sprint ability are clearly important in Gaelic Football, they are also the most mechanically demanding components of the running load.

Evidence from both endurance and team-sport literature supports an initial emphasis on running volume at lower and moderate intensities to drive aerobic adaptation (Midgley et al., 2007). This approach allows players to accumulate meaningful weekly load while keeping musculoskeletal stress within manageable limits.

Importantly, Gaelic Football–specific research supports this sequencing. Malone and colleagues (2017) showed that players with higher chronic running loads – and regular exposure to faster running speeds – had lower injury risk. The key point, however, is that this exposure was accumulated over time, not rushed in the opening weeks.

Pre-season Conditioning #3: Progression Is the Intervention

Progression should be viewed as the primary training stimulus during pre-season. Repeating the same conditioning sessions week after week is unlikely to produce continued adaptation. Equally, large and unplanned spikes in load can overwhelm a player’s current capacity.

Effective progression involves:

1. Gradual increases in weekly running volume
2. Controlled exposure to higher running speeds
3. Consideration of how conditioning interacts with pitch-based drills

Systematic reviews consistently show that rapid increases in training load are associated with higher rates of injury, illness, and soreness (Drew & Finch, 2016). From a practical standpoint, this means that the goal of pre-season should be consistency of exposure, not isolated “hard” sessions.

Pre-season Conditioning #4: Measuring and Promoting Aerobic Improvement

There are challenges with testing. Conditions on the day (pitch quality, rain, wind etc) can play havoc with the testing session itself, and you then need to ensure you plan the retest. Depending on the layout of the season, secondary or tertiary tests can be very difficult to fit into the schedule in order to measure progress.

One approach is to use GPS (if you have access) or, with the proliferation of wearables, to use running watches to measure pace achieved on each rep of your longer conditioning sets. If similar distances or times for reps are used, individuals can use the pace achieved as their improvement metric. This can keep individuals engaged in the longer aerobic-based running sessions.

For example, repeated 4-minute efforts would allow players to track the pace achieved for each rep. While you can build the reps up through the pre-season to accumulate volume, you can also challenge the player to increase their pace at the same time.

Aerobic conditioning plays a key role in repeat sprint performance by improving recovery between efforts (Bishop et al., 2011). However, this adaptation is best achieved through progressive exposure rather than constant maximal work. High-intensity running and speed endurance training are powerful stimuli, but they are most effective when layered onto an established aerobic base (Iaia & Bangsbo, 2010).

Pre-season Conditioning #5: Integrating Conditioning With Football Training

As you go deeper into pre-season, time playing football increases, and running-based work reduces. By truly understanding your game model, you have the opportunity to drive towards more specific conditioning based on the way you want to execute the game.

If you have an aim to be more structured with your attack, you will be more reliant on repeat accelerations and decelerations to break opponents’ time. Weighting your time on pitch towards drills and scenarios that develop those qualities should be your priority. Then, progress the volume appropriately.

This is where planning and monitoring systems, become valuable. By planning weekly running loads and intensity distribution, coaches can ensure that progression is deliberate rather than accidental. Pre-season conditioning does not need to be extreme to be effective. When volume and intensity are progressed with intent, physiological adaptation follows – and with it, more resilient and better-prepared players when the season begins.

To learn more about how to maximise the pre-season for your team, join our free webinar on Monday, the 19th of January, where Neil Welch, PhD, and Shane Malone, PhD, will be sharing their knowledge and experience to help you maximise the pre-season period. They’ll be taking a detailed look at the demands of Gaelic Football under the FRC’s rules amendments, and providing some key principles of program design to guide you in your pre-season planning.

How do you plan it? – Your webinar prep

We’re going to walk through the practicalities of designing your pre-season conditioning in our upcoming webinar, so here is some homework! Figure out your preseason logistics. All you need is a calendar. Work your way back from the first game:

• How many weeks do you have from when you want to get started and that first game?
• How many weeks of football sessions do you want/need prior to that first game?
• How many weeks are you left with? Within the individual weeks, how many sessions can be devoted to training? Keeping in mind, you will likely want some strength training as part of this.

You should have an idea of how many sessions are available to you across those weeks. Bring this information to the webinar, and we will go through how to design your pre-season.

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References

• Bishop, D., Girard, O., & Mendez-Villanueva, A. (2011). Repeated-sprint ability — Part II: Recommendations for training. Sports Medicine.
• Drew, M.K., & Finch, C.F. (2016). The relationship between training load and injury, illness and soreness. Sports Medicine.
• Gabbett, T.J. (2016). The training—injury prevention paradox. British Journal of Sports Medicine.
• Iaia, F.M., & Bangsbo, J. (2010). Speed endurance training and physiological adaptation. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
• Malone, S. et al. (2017). Training load and injury risk in elite Gaelic football. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport.
• Midgley, A.W. et al. (2007). Training to enhance cardiovascular adaptation. Sports Medicine.