The first few sessions are vital to get your players to buy in and keep coming back. You don’t want half your team to decide that they will just wait until the week before the first game to come to training. Exercises will be more of a generic, foundational nature at this point with a focus on getting people moving.

You can’t plan this phase too rigidly, as you need to assess the level that players are starting at. There’s a very real possibility that some of your group hasn’t done any kind of exercise at all since the last season ended so you can’t plan too much beforehand.

The most important objectives in this phase are to set expectations and to start to build some physical foundations. Focus on steering the culture of the group and getting everyone on board to go through the whole program together. Put some extra effort into trying to make it fun. Preseason is a process so don’t try to turn it up to 11 immediately. This will help you avoid injuries later (and possibly mutiny).

In order to build the physical foundations you need for later, there should be plenty of strength-building exercises. As always, keep it functional and definitely don’t skip leg day. Start individualising programs early and vary exercises for specific players to be easier or harder to match their current level.

This will be the longest phase of your preseason and will see the biggest change in fitness levels here. You are moving from the foundational levels of strength and conditioning exercises and should be starting to see a slow move towards a standard level of fitness among the majority of players.

Strength exercises will start to change focus to being more about strength endurance rather than pure strength building exercises. You shouldn’t be stopping all work on building strength completely but changing the mix. An example of this might be working on pushups with raised feet in smaller reps to keep building strength while doing exercises based on how many standard pushups a player can do in a given time period (while maintaining quality, of course).

Running exercises will also start to mirror the demands of your particular sport more. It’s important to keep varying them though, to keep things interesting and to stop player’s bodies from getting too comfortable in doing the same thing. The body adapts when it is exposed to different stimuli and changing things up can help prevent getting stuck on a plateau.

Mix strength and conditioning together in an exercise. For example, rather than just doing a straight sprint, alter starting positions (e.g. lying on the ground) or have them start by doing reps of a strength exercise first. This mirrors sports better as well because you will be doing both at once throughout a game.

This is the phase where players will do the most work and be getting back into the rhythm of things, so it’s vitally important to keep everyone engaged and enjoying themselves so they don’t drop out. Try to incorporate fun elements like throwing a ball around during exercises and have some sport-specific exercises thrown in occasionally.

This phase is the least well-defined, especially as you move from preseason to in-season training. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important at all though. The aim in this phase is to capitalise on all the prior work to get that extra bit of fitness.

Players can see games in the near future so they should be more engaged than at any point in the program. This is the ideal time to be able to push for that extra rep or minute of work. Be smart about how much extra you try to load on, as you don’t want to start the season off sluggish by doing too much right at the end.

From here, you will transition into in-season training. That doesn’t mean that you can stop all fitness training though. Make sure you are doing enough work during the season to maintain the gains made during preseason and then the game experience should sharpen that up a bit more. It’s difficult to significantly raise fitness during the season due to the schedule so make the preseason count.

No matter how much fun you make it, preseason is hard work. One benefit to the team to come out of this is that the shared ‘suffering’ of preseason bonds your players together. Pay attention to cultivating a culture of encouraging each other and contributing to the team from the beginning and you should notice a togetherness later.

It’s also good for the individual too. When it gets late in a game, it’s not just about having something left in the tank physically. A solid preseason gives players mental strength to make that extra effort. The confidence gained from a good preseason is not something to be scoffed at.