How do you train a squad that doesn't fade?
Last season we wanted the squad to keep working through the competition block, not spend the year slowly giving back what we'd built in pre-season. So we held most of the running volume, kept four proper training days in the week, and pushed one of those days hard. Thursday ended up faster than anything we'd done before the season started.
We also tagged every drill against match pace. That gave the coaches and players a shared reference for what we'd banked each week, rather than a GPS total that meant very little on its own.
Kintetsu finished the closing twenty at +8.1 net points per match, the best number in the league. I can't draw a straight causal line from our training to that result. But this is what we did on the running side that year.
The annual curve
I plotted the squad's average weekly distance from club week 2 through 43. Pre-season averaged about 17,700 metres per active player each week. Once the season started, we averaged about 15,100. So we kept 85 percent of the pre-season volume.
That was the plan. We wanted enough work in the week to keep the aerobic and repeated-effort base moving, while still getting the players to Saturday ready to play. The peak in-season week ended up within 33 metres of the biggest pre-season week.
The line wasn't tidy, though. Week 9, our second week of competition, dropped below 60 percent of the in-season average. That wasn't a clever scheduled deload. We were reacting.
The medical sheet around weeks 8 and 9 shows the first soft-tissue cluster of the year, and some of it had started before we pulled the volume back.
I spent that fortnight wondering whether we'd asked for too much too early. By week 11 we were back above 16,000 metres and the volume held from there, but I don't think the deload story fits neatly into a paragraph about successful periodisation. The injury post picks that up properly.
The shape of a week
The annual total only makes sense once you look inside the week. We rotated the schedule around the fixture. A Saturday match meant Wednesday and Sunday off; a Sunday match meant Thursday and the following Monday off.
Pre-season had no league fixtures but kept the same principle: Sat and Sun off in the typical week, with periodic friendlies, scrimmages and rehab sessions filling some weekends. Ten of the eleven in-season matches in the 2024-25 club year were Saturdays, so a normal Sat-match week is the cycle to compare pre-season to.
In pre-season we trained Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Tuesday carried the most volume and ran a shade over match pace, while Friday was the second hard day. Monday and Thursday supported those two sessions. The weekend was usually free unless we had a friendly, scrimmage or rehab session.
Over a couple of years I experimented with the shape of that week. I'd run five- and six-day models before this one, and on paper they bank more metres. On the pitch they didn't. With a session every day there was no day the squad could go properly hard at, so intensity flattened across the week and fatigue crept up. The injury list followed.
The metres the fifth day added were cheaper than the metres the hard days lost. Four days was the version that survived. Protect the days off, and push past match load on the days you do train.
A block from a previous season is the clearest example for me. We went Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Saturday, Friday. That gave us two eight-day turnarounds, followed by two six-day turnarounds.
We loaded those longer weeks, especially the first day back. That first session could run longer and we could train harder because we had more time to recover. When the six-day turnarounds arrived, we trained less. Across the four weeks, we still maintained our chronic workload because we'd done more in the two longer weeks.
I wouldn't look at any of those weeks on its own. I knew the short turnarounds were coming, and the longer weeks gave us room to get the work in without chasing it later.
Once the games started, Monday became a light day with video and a short field session. Tuesday carried the volume and most of the contact. We aimed for roughly a match load in less time, which pushed the running rate well past match pace on our tags.
Thursday was the sharpener. It averaged 148 percent of our match ball-in-play running benchmark, but we kept the total volume down so the boys could recover before Saturday. Friday was the captain's run, Saturday the match, and Sunday was for recovery and medicals.
We weren't trying to make every day hard. Tuesday and Thursday needed space around them so the players could hit both properly. That was the benefit of the four-day shape: fewer sessions, better work when we trained.
Did the forwards train a different program?
The squad average could still hide a problem. If the backs held their work while the forwards dropped away, the team number would look fine and tell us very little. So I split the volume into four position groups.
All four groups retained between 80 and 91 percent of their pre-season volume. Halves and outside backs still covered the most distance, and tight-five forwards the least, but the retention rates sat in the same band. In volume terms, the forwards were doing the same program scaled to their match demands.
High-speed-running retention came out a little lower. We did more of that work in pre-season, then maintained it through the competition block. I was comfortable with that trade because the total running base stayed in place across every group.
The chronic baseline
Weekly data jumps around. One deload drags the line down, one hard week sends it back up, and it becomes easy to overread either one. I used a 12-week rolling mean here because I wanted a longer view of the running base we'd built, not because twelve weeks is a magic number.
The red line builds through pre-season, peaks in the middle of the competition block, and then stays in a tight band. Twenty of the twenty-three in-season weeks sat above 90 percent of the peak. Even late in the year, the rolling mean was still at 94 percent.
Then the squad stopped training and the line fell. The base stayed while we were working, and that is the part I care about here. The chart can't tell me what that did to the result.
Tagging sessions against match pace
Weekly distance still doesn't tell you how the rugby was being played. "We ran 7,684 metres on Tuesday" sounds precise, but without a pace reference it doesn't tell a coach much.
The benchmark I used was 110 metres per minute of ball-in-play time, paired with an intensity benchmark of 1.1. Full-match running for the squad sat at about 70 m/min because that includes every stoppage. The 110 figure strips those stoppages out. We tagged every full-squad session, and every drill inside it, against those numbers.
I don't think 110 is sacred. It gave us a consistent reference that everyone understood, and that was useful enough to coach from.
Pre-season Tuesdays sat at 110 percent of the benchmark and Fridays at 102. In-season, Tuesday moved to 126 percent and Thursday to 148.
Our thinking was that match-pace running shouldn't feel unfamiliar on Saturday. That doesn't make an 80-minute match submaximal overall. A match has collisions, tactical pressure and a completely different duration. On the running side, though, the players had already worked above that pace during the week.
If I moved to another club, I'd take the tagging system with me. It made conversations with coaches simpler and kept the running attached to the rugby we wanted to play.
What one of those days looked like
A Thursday at 148 percent wasn't 80 minutes of running flat out. We built it from shorter drill blocks and placed the hardest work after the squad was warm, but before fatigue started pulling the quality apart.
In-season
We'd open with skills. Handling under fatigue is a different beast from handling fresh, and the boys needed reps on the tired version, but only once the clean version was sound. So the skill block sits early. Controlled tempo. Decision reps and set-piece touches at about 95 percent of game speed.
From there we'd move to unstructured attack. Open ball, no called structure. The boys reading and running. That block typically tagged around 135 percent because the ball never stopped and there was no whistle to hide behind.
The brutal block was defence shorthanded. Fourteen against fifteen, the defenders one body down, attackers cued to find line breaks and force the cover. Being a player short means somebody is always one phase behind the play, sprinting to recover. That's where the 170-ish percent BIP comes from, and it's where the 148 percent session mean lives.
After the shorthanded block we'd go back to full structure for a short game scenario. That brought the running rate down and asked the players to find their shape again while they were tired.
The slippery slope underneath all of this is staying rugby-relevant. It would be easy to chase the intensity tag with a pure conditioning circuit and hit 170 percent on the GPS without a ball in sight. That doesn't train the player to make a decision while exhausted, it just trains him to be exhausted.
The brief I worked to was: keep the drill recognisable as rugby, and let the structural constraint of being a player short push the running rate. The quality has to stay high enough that mistakes get punished. If it drops and the session goes helter-skelter, the training stops earning its place in the week.
Did training ever demand more running than a match?
On GPS, yes. I mean running output only here, not the total physical or mental cost of playing a match.
The biggest match total for a Kintetsu starter was Tom Hendrickson's ninety-three minutes against Kamaishi in Round 9. Hayato Yokoi's Friday session in pre-season week 5 was our biggest training total. Yokoi covered about 40 percent more distance in that session than Hendrickson did in the match. They are different players and different demands, so I see that as a comparison of the two peaks, nothing more.
At squad level, our hardest training day averaged 7,633 metres per player. The average league match was 5,049. Again, that's our peak training day against an average match, not proof that training was harder than the hardest game.
The match running rates give the same running-only picture. The squad averaged 70 metres per minute of full-clock match time, and the highest individual full-match rate was 89. Our hardest drill blocks sat well above both. That told me the pace itself was being rehearsed, even though the match remained the bigger overall demand.
What I'll change next season
I'd like to see whether we can hold closer to 90 percent of pre-season volume, but that's a coaching question for next year, not a conclusion from this one. I'd only push it if the medical picture and the quality of the hard days stayed where we wanted them.
I would keep the Tuesday-Thursday split. It gave us two sessions the players could attack, with enough recovery between them, and I preferred that to spreading the same work across more days.
The tagging needs work too. We used the same 110 m/min benchmark across every position, even though halves and outside backs run differently from the tight five. Next time I'd tag each group against its own match pace. The training might stay the same, but the label would be more honest.
What this post can't tell me
This is one season at one club. I don't have other clubs' periodisation data, and I'd want another couple of seasons before treating these numbers as stable. The 110 m/min benchmark is also one squad-wide figure. A position-specific version would be more accurate, and we already have the data to build it.
The weeks where we backed off matter as much to me as the 85 percent headline. We kept the shape of the week, but adjusted the load when the squad needed it.
Five of eight clubs in the league faded in the last twenty. We didn't. I can't prove the training caused that. I'd run the same weekly shape again, and measure it better.
Coming next: the contact and gym side of the same year.