The future of football schools: private tactical training
There are mental trainers, there are physical trainers, and there are technique trainers all of them can be external and hired by the player. But have you ever heard of an individual tactical trainer, that is external and hired by the player?
The odds are that most of you guys know about Tactalyse and how we work together with professional players. Until now we’ve only done online video sessions with professional players about game situations. But recently we started giving individual tactical training directly on the training pitch and the results were amazing. To work together with players and correct behaviour directly on the training pitch is so effective.
We’ve developed a training method that is completely in line with the methodology of Tactalyse. Everything we do is improving the tactical qualities of the player. The methodology of Tactalyse is consists of 190 different fundamentals, which each have an optimal execution. Each fundamental has different steps that need to be trained to optimally perform the fundamental as a whole. So in the warming up we already start training this, in a lot of sports is normal to dry train on patterns and physical execution of specific game situations. We visualize the game situations we are going to train before the training. In this way, the player already knows in the warming up what this footwork is for. This visualization helps the player when dry training, he visualizes the situation he’s executing. So only in the warm-up, the player has already executed the optimal execution of the fundamental at least 20 times. If you do this consistently, the behaviours we train to optimally execute the whole of an individual tactic become automatism.
So our philosophy is to prepare the players physically but also cognitively on the specific fundamental. This is done with exercises that train the behaviour that’s needed to optimally execute an individual tactic. We start by doing this with easy exercises, which we will gradually make more challenging cognitively. In this way, the player gets a natural progression through the individual tactic.
It depends on the level of the player how fast we progress through the different exercises and how much cognitive resistance we will implement in the training, also known as differential learning. The beautiful thing about the training method is that it’s designed in such a way, that the players progress naturally through the individual tactics. In this way, it’s easy to see where something goes wrong, because we will see exactly at which step the player fails. After this, we can take a step back and train more on this, until the player masters it and it’s time to move to the next step of the fundamental. This method results in a unique experience for the player. He will directly feel when things go wrong and will become conscious about what goes wrong because it’s very clear which behaviour in which game situation we’re training. In combination with us correcting this on the spot, this leads to a really fast learning experience. We’ve seen players go from not knowing what to do in a game situation to almost perfectly executing the individual tactic. Because we’re able to repeat a certain game situation over and over until the player learns the right behaviour.
Another good thing about the training, we’re training specific football actions. So you train the physical movement of the individual tactic, we do everything at game speed after our warm-up. But because an individual tactic is so short (the average execution of a fundamental is 5 seconds) and because we divide it into several steps the physical load can be adjusted according to what the player wants or needs. When a player is in-season, we understand that there is less room for physically demanding training. But the beautiful thing about the exercises is, that we can train the optimal tactical behaviour without exhausting the player physically. This is because a lot of the tactical training is cognitive, so you also have to take the cognitive load into account, what we mean by this can be read here. When a player is in the offseason and he wants to train with us, we can adjust the physical load, so he also gets the physical stimulation needed. This is something that we discuss with the player before the training.
Of course, we also use video in these training sessions. We film the training from a high point and a close point. The video then gets transferred to an iPad and In this way, we can look at the execution of the fundamental. So in short the benefits of doing training with us are:
- A lot of repetitions on a specific game situation helps with recognizing patterns
- More cognitive load will help the player later on in a match
- Direct feedback and adjustments in the behaviour of the player
- The online sessions become even more real for the player, which makes him better prepared for real game situations
- The physical side of football gets directly linked to the cognitive side
- A good buildup in the training, to understand every step in the fundamental.
This was the theory and a general overview of tactical training in the philosophy of Tactalyse. But how would such training look in real life? We will now give an in-depth view of the training we did with a centre back and a defensive midfielder. We started with training the footwork that was needed to execute the defensive fundamentals we were going to train. We did this with simple exercises, no decision-making was involved, just dry training the footwork needed for the optimal execution, we used ladder drills and cones for this. After around 30 repetitions with a gradual build-up in intensity and speed, so that the players were physically ready for the next step we did an extension of the warm-up where we included the ball and took the exercise a step further. In this exercise, one player had the ball and the other had to execute the specific step in the fundamental. The player with the ball dribbled and how the player dribbled and his body positioning decided how the defensive player should execute the fundamental. In this way, the player is already training cognitively on how to execute the fundamental. Because these players were in the offseason, we could load them a bit more physically, so we added an element of competition. But it was still in the category of dry training, so there was no physical contact. It was purely training the right execution based on what the dribbling player was doing. Because of this element of competition the players went up to game speed, already here there we’re made mistakes in the optimal action, mistakes we’re made, and came to the surface immediately because of the element of competition. Because it was a live training and we are so close on the players we can immediately coach on how to correct this. If the player is doing it wrong several times, we stop the exercise and discuss. In this way, the player moves very fast through the learning curve because we make him so conscious about which specific step of the individual tactic goes wrong. After this exercise, we were ready for doing the main exercise. In this exercise all the steps for optimal execution of the individual tactic are put together, the main focus was body positioning and the footwork when defending a 1v1 situation. Here we trained the exact game situation as it happens in a match. This is when players move from consciously incompetent to consciously competent. We experienced this with both players we trained. We did around 15 repetitions of this game situation and of the first five repetitions there were around 2-3 going wrong, so we corrected and reminded them of previous exercises. Between repetitions 5-10 there were made a maximum of 2 mistakes and by the time we did 15 repetitions the players were almost perfectly executing the individual tactic.
We think this type of tactical training is the future of football. In recent years you have already seen more and more separate training based on position. But in our eyes, this can be done more specifically and more tailored to the needs of a specific player. Every position has its own game situations that happen the most. That’s why these positions need to train specifically on these game situations and get better at these. We don’t have exact numbers, but as you see in our example training we’ve trained the specific game situation at least 60 times. The training didn’t take longer than 60 minutes. The progress you can make with 60 repetitions is enormous, especially when a Tactalyse coach is present and correcting a player directly on the training pitch.
Summary
Have you ever heard of an individual tactical trainer, that is external and hired by the player? Until now we’ve only done online video sessions with professional players about game situations. But recently we started giving individual tactical training directly on the training pitch and the results were amazing. We’ve developed a training method that is completely in line with the methodology of Tactalyse. Everything we do is improving the tactical qualities of the player. Each fundamental has different steps that need to be trained to optimally perform the fundamental as a whole.
Our philosophy is to prepare the players physically but also cognitively on the specific fundamental. This is done with exercises that train the behaviour that’s needed to optimally execute an individual tactic. The beautiful thing about the training method is that it’s designed in such a way, that the players progress naturally through the individual tactics. In this way, it’s easy to see where something goes wrong, because we will see exactly at which step the player fails. This method results in a unique experience for the player. He will directly feel when things go wrong and will become conscious about what goes wrong because it’s very clear which behaviour in which game situation we’re training. In combination with us correcting this on the spot, this leads to a really fast learning experience.
But how would such training look in real life? We take a training we did with a centre back and a defensive midfielder as an example. We started with training the footwork that was needed to execute the defensive fundamental we were going to train. After this fundamental specific warm-up, we did an exercise where one player had the ball and the other had to execute the specific step in the fundamental. The player with the ball dribbled and how the player dribbled and his body positioning decided how the defensive player should execute the fundamental. This was purely training the right execution based on what the dribbling player was doing, with no physical contact whatsoever. After this exercise, we were ready for doing the main exercise. In this exercise all the steps for optimal execution of the individual tactic are put together, the main focus was body positioning and the footwork when defending a 1v1 situation. Here we trained the exact game situation as it happens in a match.
We think this type of tactical training is the future of football. In recent years you have already seen more and more separate training based on position. But in our eyes, this can be done more specifically and more tailored to the needs of a specific player.