Rui Sá Lemos, Certified Trainer at our school, and coach with experience ate FC Porto, Vizela FC and Portimonense SC.

PT: Looking at human beings, they benefit from a certain consistency, such as the circadian cycle or the same number of days between games. But nowadays all that doesn’t exist. Looking at your experience, what do you take into account to try to minimize the impact of these constant changes?

Rui Sá Lemos: Yeah, I think, first of all, it’s very related to what you do in the drill and the message you send to the players. If you think about it, you are going to be challenged by many things around the team, like TV schedules, travel, different fixtures, different periods of matches, national teams, injuries, and the calendar. Okay, so if your message is also unstable, it’s instability on top of instability. You will be able to control the regularity of your team a bit more if your message is consistent during all moments.

When I say aligned, I mean aligned in July should be aligned with October, Monday should be aligned with Friday, and match day should be aligned with your assistant coaches.

Okay, so you’re saying one thing, and if they ask the assistant coach, the assistant coach will not explain something different. For me, alignment will give you the consistency to control the inconsistency around the team.

The alignment of the message you give in training, the quality of the message in the training drill, and the consistency of your idea by repeating, without repeating the same concepts and principles of your style of play and game model. So, I would say this, Miguel, you know.

The process between all these different clubs and years, even in my head, has changed a little bit, and I think I’m better now than I was at Porto B, for example. Yes, mostly training in the morning, but one thing we did at the last club in Vizela, which had a great impact on our performance in the league, was to have a second training session on Wednesday afternoons, or just before the normal training session, focused on set-pieces.

So just before the main session, when they were fresh and more focused, we worked on a lot of set-piece details. That made us the best set-piece team in the league. When we left in December, offensively we were the best team in the Portuguese league, competing with strong teams like Sporting, Benfica and Porto. We were creating a lot, which we hadn’t done in the previous season. So what changed from one season to the next were some players, which is important, but also our process, where we added different elements.

I’m not giving this example to say that training in the morning is perfect and will take us to the Champions League. No, if we think there’s something new we can add that will give us what we need at that moment, we have to do it, and that’s the alignment with your beliefs. You look at the team, you analyze the previous season, you see that we only scored three goals from set pieces and you decide that we need to score ten more goals from set pieces because that will give us 20 more points.

So we have to do it. But when? That’s the key question.

PT: You’ve been in a context where the weeks are different, usually between eight and six days between matches. Is there a pattern to how you organize the week?

Rui Sá Lemos: Yeah, the stability of your bio-rhythm. So, if normally, when you have seven days, you prepare on the Saturday before, the Friday before, the Thursday before, and the Wednesday before, these four days in a row, at least preparing for your game, okay? If you normally do that, my question is, okay, you won.

You’re going to have an important game eight days or nine days later. Why are you going to change that? Why are you going to affect this kind of routine that they already have and that they are already prepared for?

Because sometimes before a match, training for five or six days in a row instead of only four in a row, for example, I’m speaking about our process. That would be very different, you know? Why?

Because our training sessions, they were like war. They were like war in terms of the competition inside the training was so high, the energy that the manager puts in the session is so high, that our feeling would always be if we trained for 10 more minutes, they would split in two, you know? They would exhaust themselves.

So that’s the question. But that’s a compliment because I think it’s very difficult for you to put players to train and compete and run in the way that you can do it. So it’s a big compliment.

But then you also need to understand, okay, our process is to have these four days. And in some weeks, for example, you play on a Friday and the next match day is only on Monday. So it’s a good reflection to have.

So probably we would do something like give two days off or train and break it in the middle, like train, off, train, come back again, and then a bonus in the middle of that. But we’re always saying that we cannot change the pattern. We’re saying this always.

We can’t change the pattern. So if the fixture is already changing the number of days that we need to prepare, we need to maintain the pattern. And by the pattern, I mean the normal Wednesday should be the normal Wednesday, the Thursday, the Friday, and the Saturday before the game should be the same.

So that’s why when we have something like eight days or nine days, sometimes we would make a day off in the middle of the week. Why? Then we would come back and make the next following four days or the next following sometimes three days to prepare for the game.

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Keywords: PATTERN MORPHOCYCLE; FOOTBALL/SOCCER; TACTICAL PERIODIZATION®; TRAINING SESSION; EXERCISE; COACH.

Photo by: Rui Duarte Silva