Football Conditioning Licence – Applications Open
Monday, 21 February 2011

The FFA Football Conditioning Licence is a new addition to FFA’s Advanced Coaching Pathway.

The Advanced Pathway is for coaches of 11-a-side football, coaching teams of talented players from U-13 upwards. It is totally concerned with the ‘Game Training’ and ‘Performance’ phases of the FFA National Football Curriculum ‘Building Blocks’.

Who is the Football Conditioning Licence for?

The course is aimed at high-level football coaches and Sport Scientists who wish to work in high-level football.

(NB. The FFA Football Conditioning Licence will be the mandatory requirement for Conditioning Coaches in the Hyundai A-League from the 2015/16 season onwards.)

Who can enrol on the Football Conditioning Licence?

• Coaches who hold a current FFA A Licence
• Coaches who are currently enrolled on an FFA A Licence
• Holders of a Sport Science degree

What is ‘Football Conditioning’ all about?

Physical fitness is an inseparable component of football’s structure which leads to the proposition:

• conditioning is football training
• football training is conditioning.

Analysis of football conditioning shows:

• Football is becoming more and more compact: less space on the pitch / time on the ball.
• Because of this the number of explosive football actions (‘football’ sprints / duels etc.) in professional football has increased by 40% over the last 8 to 10 years.

As a result of this, ‘Football Conditioning’ is all about:

• increase of explosive power in football actions
• increase of explosive power stamina (explosive capacity)
• decrease of recovery time between two explosive actions
• increase of recovery stamina (recovery capacity).



The Football Conditioning Method:

The foundation of the method in practical terms is the exclusive use of game-related football exercises to improve fitness for football. Additionally, we aim to eliminate any conditioning testing that gives non-relevant information for football fitness.




About the Instructor: Dr. Raymond Verheijen

Dr Raymond Verheijen is highly sought after both as a presenter and on the training pitch having worked with the KNVB , the Korean Republic and Russian National Teams under Guus Hiddink, as well as extensively throughout Europe with clubs like FC Barcelona, Zenith St. Petersburg, Chelsea and Manchester City. He is also the author of the book ‘Conditioning in Soccer’. Recently, he published his new book ‘Periodisation in Football’.

Course Details

Dates: 20th to 23rd June, 2011
(Coaches should also be available for these alternative dates,
2-5 June)
Venue: Australian Institute of Sport, Canberra
Cost: $2,500 + GST (Includes meals, tracksuit, polo, and bag)

Click Here to Download Application Form
http://www.a-league.com.au/default.aspx?s=newsdisplay&id=39042

Quote:
Verheijen is amazed by the amount of injuries that several clubs are dealing with at the moment.

"I can not and do not want to say anything substantially about what is happening at other clubs or at Feyenoord. To be specific about that you need to be involved directly. Generally speaking I can say that a wave of injuries can be prevented easily by balanced training," he says.

In the 10 years that I have been in this line of work I have never experienced a wave of injuries in the teams I am involved with. Of course there is always the odd injury in football. That is inherent to the sport. It's normal to have one or two injured players in a group of twenty. When there is ten or twelve there is something wrong in the training build up."

"It often goes wrong during pre-season. Coaches focus on fitness to much in that period. What is? Building in automatisms and you can only do that when you are working with a steady group of players every day. But because they start working hard on fitness straight after the players' vacations they get injured and you can not train with the intended basic team. With good football training you gain enough fitness."

"I do not believe in many training sessions. In football it is important that every session has a high level of intensity. When you train very often you develop chronic tiredness and the quality of the training sessions falls. When you are tired but you have to strain yourself, your coordination is less good and you get injured quicker."

To monitor a player's tiredness the Omega Wave is on the rise, a machine that asserts to measure the load of physical strain a player can handle.

"In most scientific literature that machine is burned to the ground. The margin of error is too big. You can use it well to calculate the average load for a group of athletes, but it does not provide accurate information for individuals. Besides it is a well-known secret that players know exactly how to manipulate the machine by now. The Omega Wave is often used by clubs to show how professional they are, but I believe that using unreliable machinery is shows your amateurism."

"By calling out for research and other complicated measures clubs give the impression that it is very difficult to solve the problem. But in reality it is actually very simple. By adjusting the different training impulses to each other you get immediate results. Often when there is a wave of injuries they point the finger at at the medical staff, totally unjustified. There is only one person to prevent a wave of injuries and that is the coach. He has to provide a decent training build up, so that players don't start an intensive exertion when they are already tired. Coaches shouldn't consider a wave of injuries as something that happens to them as a result of bad luck or external factors, but as something they are responsible for themselves. Without that change of culture nothing changes, no matter what study you carry out ."