Interval Program for Football

shakeydude

Hi,

I was hoping to go to the track to do interval running to help with the GAA. Could anyone give me some info on the times and distances that I should be aiming for???

Cheers

Shakeydude

thirtyfoot

I'd recommend you start with some tempo running on the track. This involves improving your aerobic threshold and depending on your fitness and available time etc will help you to move onto more difficult speed endurance type work later. Examples of an intensive tempo session on the track would be:

8-12 x 100m (with 90secs recovery between each run) or 8-10 x 150m (with 2mins between runs). These would be done at 80-85% of your max. Your max is hard to gauge unless you have done a lot of track running and say have a personal best times for 100m, 200m etc. Best way is to just go out and do the session, record your times, and see how you feel at the end of the session. You can tweak, chop and change based on what your body is telling you. I believe the key in interval training is to maintain quality, no point doing a session if you end up struggling through half the reps at a very slow pace. An example of this session for a person who could run a 100m in 12secs could be 10 x 100 in 14-15 secs with 90 secs recovery.

shakeydude

Cheers Tingle,

I will give that a go and tweak it to my own levels. I know what your saying about quality sessions and hopefully I will show some restraint and not burn myself out after the first lap:D

Patto

Interval training also called Speed endurance training is repeated intervals over distances from 400M to 1200M at 75%-80% effort or 3-5 Km race pace with recovery to 100-120bpm HR.

If you want to work out what your 5K pace is without running a 5K race run 5x1000M with 60secs recovery. That is pretty close to your 5K race pace. A competitive GAA player will easily run those 1000M intervals in under 4 minutes.

You put this in the context of GAA however which opens a whole other can of worms. I will to post a new thread on the field sports and interval running.

Tingle's suggestion is probably more relevant for a GAA player tbh but I would run shorter intervals 10-100M at full speed with full recovery.

thirtyfoot

Patto wrote:

Interval training also called Speed endurance training is repeated intervals over distances from 400M to 1200M at 75%-80% effort or 3-5 Km race pace with recovery to 100-120bpm HR.

If you want to work out what your 5K pace is without running a 5K race run 5x1000M with 60secs recovery. That is pretty close to your 5K race pace. A competitive GAA player will easily run those 1000M intervals in under 4 minutes.

I think 75-80% is too slow for Speed Endurance, thats more like tempo running. To get the benefit of speed endurance you should be at least 90% as the purpose of speed endurance is to improve your ability to maintain your close to top speed for as long as possible.

When I see that 5km reference I'm thinking it relates to interval work that maybe distance runners might be doing. For speed endurance (reps of 70-150m) you don't want to be running at 5km pace, its way too slow unless you are a 5km runner.

Patto

Sorry Tingle, I think there is a bit of cross talk going on. What I call an interval session or a speed endurance session is a stamina session. I think what you are talking about are pure speed drills. The objective of an interval session as I defined it is to improve V02 max (aerobic fitness) not max speed or how long you can maintain max speed.

The 75-80% is as a percentage of max speed, its works out more like 95-98% effort (MHR) or 95% V02 max, that is 5K pace. Its not tempo running, tempo runs are run at a slower pace (generally slower than your 10K pace).

I'm not sure how relvant running 70-150M at max speed is to a GAA player. A GAA players speed work should be over shorter intervals and at full trottle.

shakeydude

Patto wrote:

I'm not sure how relvant running 70-150M at max speed is to a GAA player. A GAA players speed work should be over shorter intervals and at full trottle.

Well I was thinking to do a mixture of both long(400m) and short (100m) at varying intensity.I thought that the interval running would help my sprints with the 50-100m sprints and then the 400m would help my VO2 capacity. For Gaa I think that you have to develop both. I did one session before where we ran 4miles in total in about 40 mins doing sprints,70% runs and slow jogs running between 100-400m. I am just a bit confusticated

Patto

This thread has become a bit incoherent. I know this is your thread but if I may I would refer you to the field sports thread I opened yesterday. The first post in the thread is a long post (and I was trying to keep it as short as I could) but it should at least attempt to explain some of the confusion and apparent conflicts in this thread.