Think of the type of physical activity that occurs in your sport. Is it a high volume of medium intensity exertion or is it repeated high intensity efforts with periods of rest or something else? Don’t just think of the general profile of the sport but also consider how your gameplan may change those demands.

Those patterns of exertion should influence the way you train fitness and what outcomes you are after. The foundations will likely look similar but as the base fitness rises, the exercises should start to look a bit different.

Interval training has many variants with tweaked work to rest ratios but the core principle is the same across them all. A high intensity effort is followed by a lower intensity effort or rest period and then the cycle repeats. This kind of training is efficient due to the shorter time and fewer footsteps involved.

An easy way to get started with this kind of training for running is to set out a triangle with training markers. Tell your players to run the hypotenuse (the long side) and jog the other two sides. The intensity of the sprint is important so if your players are lacking fitness, tell them they can walk the short sides to catch their breath more.

Using interval training for running will help your players improve their active recovery as well as improve their ability to do repeated sprints. Active recovery is your players getting their breath back while still moving at a lower intensity. This will allow your players to keep on the move at a jog to get ready for another sprint instead of having to walk.

Interval training isn’t just for running. You can take the concept into a bodyweight session as a way to keep on improving fitness while sparing the impact of running. A common setup for this is Tabata and there are plenty of free Tabata timer apps out there to assist you.

The work section of this training should be high intensity like the sprint section of running-based interval training. This will mean that you need to select exercises that involve a lot of motion and that your players can maintain the intensity of. Pushups and burpees may not be that useful in the beginning if your players are struggling to do more than three or four. Exercises like mountain climbers and bicycles can be good starters as the strength requirement is lower.

Depending on what you are working with, you can use ‘rest’ exercises like front and side planks. These don’t involve the same amount of movement and can help your players recover mid-set without stopping completely. The aim should be to progress to the point where you have replaced all of these exercises but you have to start where your players are.

I will spare the finer details here due to space but, at a simple level, even the most elite athletes have a cap on how long they can operate at maximum intensity. This kind of activity leads to lactic acid buildup which will eventually force a person to slow down. The fitter a person is, the more efficient their bodies are and the longer they can maintain this level.

As a very rough guide, the maximum duration for this energy pathway is 1 to 2 minutes and is variable with age and fitness. So, if you want to get your players to improve their sprinting, telling them to just run as fast as they can for ten minutes is not going to help as much as cutting up the exercise into smaller chunks with rest or recovery.

If you want to work on general running endurance at medium - high intensity, then getting your players to run for ten minutes will work. The key here is to have them run the maximum speed they can maintain for that time rather than at their absolute maximum speed. This will use a different pathway that can last for longer.

Longer-form running is all about getting into a groove and can be quite relaxing. This relaxation factor isn’t as helpful if you are trying to improve maximal effort. For this kind of work, you want your players actively engaged and trying to push themselves. This is one of the reasons why you want to encourage your players to slow down in the active recovery phase if needed, to keep their efforts in the work phase as high as they can be.

As part of keeping everyone active and engaged, be clear with how long or how many reps an exercise will go for. Acting like the hard guy trying to make everyone throw up is likely to alienate some players. If the exercise is not defined or endless, players may also start to hold back a bit which defeats the whole aim of what you are trying to achieve.