Australia is home to a wide variety of sports, and wide variety of athletes. We mostly see them in their moments of glory – fleeting snapshots that can stick in the mind forever.
What we don’t see is the hundreds, the thousands of hours of training that make those moments possible.
When it comes to the major team sports leagues in Australia – such as the AFL, NRL, Super Rugby, A-League, NBL, and team sports that go across multiple competitions like rugby union and cricket – they share a very similar training pattern.
For these athletes, their year is divided up into three distinct periods – the pre-season, the season, and the off-season.
The pre-season is where training is done most intensely. It’s all about getting the players as fit as they possibly can be ahead of the season itself.
It’ll vary from sport to sport and level to level, but generally during the pre-season players dedicate the majority of their time getting into shape. That might be through aerobic exercise, or weights, or really anything their team physicians throw at them.
As the season gets nearer the focus typically shifts from improving fitness to improving skills, a change that becomes more pronounced once the season starts.
In the main season, training becomes less about trying to make fitness gains and more about maintaining the gains made in the pre-season.
Recovery becomes a buzzword, and players have a much greater focus on improving their skills and the other technical aspects of their game than they would have in the pre-season.
Eventually the season comes to an end, the off-season begins, the players take a well-deserved break, and social media is awash with players posing for photos in international locations.
There’s no formal training in this time, though athletes are expected to keep themselves fit. Showing up to pre-season out of shape can have dire consequences. After that, the pre-season begins again, and the cycle continues.
Various sports are difficult to compare in terms of their training loads, since the players within a team will vary greatly in terms of their own fitness requirements.
You will tend to find a bigger difference between the training loads of individuals in a single team than you would between the average training loads of different sports.
In terms of individual sports, measuring the training load difference becomes greatly dependent on the type considered.
A cyclist in training might cover up to 1000 kilometres in a single week, a distance runner might be more in the realm of 200 kilometres a week – but obviously the great difference between these sports accounts for this gulf.
Generally speaking, aerobic, endurance-based sports have the heaviest training loads. These sports require athletes to go all day, and the training requirements reflect that.
Athletes competing in ironman events, for example, will regularly clock up 40 hours of training in a week.
This is a bit different in terms of skills-based sports where the training hours are generally lower, say 20 to 30 hours a week, but the athlete’s preparation will likely involve other components, like analysing past performances, or studying the theory of the sport in greater detail.
Even athletes who play highly technical sports find themselves in the gym at some point. Golfers are always looking to improve their strength and flexibility. V8 Supercar drivers can spend more time in the gym than on the track, preparing themselves for physical and mental fatigue of high-speed driving.
All things considered, there is a great deal of variety in sport, and there is a great deal of variety in people, and so follows a great deal of variety in athletes and how they train.
At the end of the day, the one characteristic all elite athletes share is their dedication to training and to fitness. They know that preparation brings success.
The Blues have truly stood up and are a genuine flag threat in 2024 and they have their younger brigade of troops to thank for it.
It's a festival of footy as Anzac Round dawns, with matches to be played across a whopping five days in 2024's most spread-out 'weekend'…
Things heating up in Canberra!
Diplomatically answered, Darcy!
For all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds the now-traditional Anzac Day clash at the MCG, there has been one thing conspicuously lacking over…
