David Tenney is the High Performance Director of Austin FC, in MLS, a former Master’s Student and a Certified Coach by the Official School of Tactical Periodisation®, and currently is finishing our Training for Trainers Course.  He talked with us about this new age that football is currently living, where data and Performance Departments are consolidated in Football reality.

TP: Have you ever felt that Tactical Periodization® didn’t work in this group and how you manage that if it ever happened?

In my perspective, obviously I’m only 15 months into feeling like I’m using it. I think absolutely not at all, because to me, Tactical Periodization® is, how do I create a morphocycle where tactically we are improving our game model cognitively, emotionally, physically the players are getting what they need in an appropriate way. To me that is Tactical Periodization®.

Sometimes I think – we had a lot of talk on this in the class – that there’s the misperceptions of what Tactical Periodization® is. These are my acquisition days, this is how I do my morphocycle, this is it, and if I’m not doing this, then I’m not doing Tactical Periodization®? No, I mean, Tactical Periodization® is putting your game model first, dosing physically, emotional, cognitive, and the right ways over the course of the week to take the team where they need to go to. That’s the essence of my understanding of Tactical Periodization®. So it’s very intuitive. In a lot of ways, it’s very intuitive, and it makes sense why it would work with every group. Now, some groups, you have to change what you do two days before the game, and your environment might mean you do something different, and the age of the team might mean it always looks different from one team to another, but that doesn’t make it less or more Tactical Periodization®.

TP: What was your model of training before, and what did you found more useful in making the change to Tactical Periodization®?

I mean, I think I would say that I had a very misinformed sense of what Tactical Periodization® was, and I think if you look in the English, because there is research in English sports science about what Tactical Periodization is, and it is very much match day minus four is your strength day, and match day minus three is your endurance day, and match day minus two is your speed day, match day minus one is your reaction days. And a lot of people do that, and I think I was one. And we think that we’re doing Tactical Periodization® because that’s what our research says. And I think I very much followed that model. And as I said, what I found is that on match day minus four, I probably was doing way too much change of direction. Match day minus three, I probably wasn’t, and then the three days before the game, I probably was not having as high of a load or as a working on the complex game model as well as we should have been. And probably match day minus two, the two days before the game, I was doing too much as well, in overall volume of work.

That was my preferred way of doing things prior to Tactical Periodization. It’s interesting because I had a previous coach before that who was very much in favor of, and we also see this in some of the English sports science cultures of two days on, one day off, two days on, which, you know, so if you play Saturday, it’s Monday to Tuesday training, Wednesday off Thursday, Friday train, Saturday game. That was something that you still see people trying. And it’s interesting to me because after this experience with Tactical Periodization®, it literally makes the least amount of sense because Wednesday should be the day when you have your non-negotiable training of maximum, you know, you’re training maximally over the week and you’re taking that day off. And yet there are still people taken from rugby sport science that believe in this two-day on, one-day off, two-day on type methodology.

TP: What do you think about this approach of the minus one, minus two and minus three day, or plus one, plus two or  plus three day? How do you grow from plus three to minus three? How do you handle this?

That’s where it’s hard because we have coaches from many different backgrounds, and they are used to doing a minus four, minus three, minus two. They’re used to it, even though it doesn’t have as much meaning to me. We had this discussion.

So I think our role is to shift the coaching staff into understanding the content and not the labels. And that takes time, but I think that can be done. And we’re not all from the Portuguese culture. We’re used to the same naming. But also, I think that’s, to me, it’s one of the interesting things about the naming of the days within Tactical Periodization®. You’ve already seen an evolution and shift in the last three, four, five years where, you know, it used to be, you know, the yellow day, the green day, the blue day, and now you have shadings that kind of reflect the intermittency, the intermittent nature of the training session is a little bit better than the previous kind of color code of the days. We’re all trying to get the right name or symbols to attach to the content and that’s the challenge sometimes.

TP: How do you handle the process with a mid week game, not only with the practice proposals but also with the staff?

I think once you have a six-day week instead of the seven-day week then already you can’t have the green day like you normally would. But can you create something that it is close where you still have to address the game model. You have to do something that, it’s figuring, with the coach how you’re creating something with the same sizes and complexities, but now the volumes have to be really short if we’re gonna do something in bigger spaces. And I think we’ve started doing, I think I’ve had success doing that. You’re not going to do two times 10 minutes of 11 against 11 if you have one less day over the course of the week. But you can do a little bit smaller field of 11 against 11 and two times four minutes. So you’re trying to manage the times a lot more closely. Respecting the fact that to me, again, it’s 72 hours from the previous game before you can do anything of fully maximal level, you still have to respect that. And I think that is what I’ve learned from the course. We’ve all had coaches that play Sunday and you play Saturday. And on the Wednesday, the coach says, “well, we still have two days. Can’t we just do a bigger 11 against 11?” We always do it on this day. We still have two days to recover, but knowing you have one less day prior, that respecting that is still very important. And so, no, you can’t do a normal green day like you normally would, but can we really shorten everything to give a little bit of what the team needs and what the head coach wants, but you’re still being safe, respecting the fact that players are not recovered yet. And I think I found being pretty successful doing 11 against 11 in more small spaces where you are controlling the amount of extensibility and running. And you can get some of the same pictures, but it’s funny because I would always look back at some of the exercises you see that Mourinho did as he was at Chelsea many years ago. He would do 11 of 11 all the time on such really small fields sometimes. I remember on his recovery day he would do 11 vx 11 inside the penalty box, things like that. So I think it’s taking those types of ideas.

Don’t miss David Tenney’s comment in next week’s article.

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KEYWORDS: TACTICAL PERIODIZATION; TRAINING; FOOTBALL; SOCCER; SPORTS SCIENCE; GPS.