Kintetsu won the closing twenty minutes of 2025 by +8.1 net points per match, ahead of every other team in the league. The last post showed the result. This one discusses the training year and plan that helped produce it.
For this post I had a year of weekly squad GPS, the position-group splits, and the injury list sheet to work from. The scope is the running side, volume and intensity. Who doesn't love some GPS talk? Resistance training, plyometrics, contact load and skills programming sit in a separate piece.
The annual curve
Team average weekly distance, club week 2 through 43. Pre-season, in-season, late season, off-season. The pre-season-to-in-season drop is shallower than the textbook prescription. Most professional programs drop weekly volume to 60 to 70 percent of pre-season values once the season starts. Kintetsu's in-season squad-mean was 85 percent of pre-season. This was intentional. We worked hard all year, with an emphasis on maintaining match output.
In raw numbers, pre-season averaged 17,709 metres per active player per week across weeks 2 to 7. Across position groups, that mean splits widely: Tight Five forwards averaged 15,227 metres per week, Loose Forwards 16,754, Outside Backs 18,943, and Halves 20,839. A 37% gap top to bottom, expected, because match running demands themselves split that way. The in-season mean across weeks 8 to 30 was 15,123 metres squad-wide, with the per-position range narrowing to 13,523 metres (Tight Five) and 16,883 (Halves). That's a 14.6% drop on the squad mean, not the 30 to 40% drop that a "match weeks are recovery weeks" model would predict.
The peak in-season week (wk 16, 20,149 metres) sits within 33 metres of the highest pre-season week, which was wk 2 at 20,182 metres. Match weeks were maintenance-volume weeks with a quality bias, not recovery weeks.
Holding high-end aerobic and repeated-effort capacity into late-game minutes means training those qualities through the season. Our 85% in-season retention is the data version of that.
The shape of a week
The annual curve hides what the inside of a week looked like. We rotated the schedule around the fixture. A Sat match meant Wed and Sun off; a Sun match meant Thu and the following Mon 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 Mon, Tue, Thu and Fri, with Wed, Sat and Sun off. Four full-squad sessions per week, plus a periodic Saturday match or scrimmage when the friendly block ran from October on. Tuesday was the volume peak at 7,684 metres and 110 percent of game speed. Friday was the second hard day at 6,270 metres and 102 percent. Monday and Thursday sat in between as supporting days. Two big days, two moderate days, three days off. Base volume without a fifth weekday.
Over a couple of years I experimented with a number of pre-season options. I had used 5 and 6 day models previously but found that they related to lower training volumes and intensities, higher fatigue, and more injuries. My preference is to allow for recovery and to push past match load on the actual training days.
In-season we changed the brief. Monday was a clarity day, easing to 67 percent of game speed with video review and a light session. Tuesday became the big training day at 6,833 metres and 126 percent of game speed. We roughly aimed for match load on a Tuesday, in less time. This was also our highest contact-load day. Thursday became the sharpener at 148 percent of game speed, the single highest-intensity day of the year, although we modulated the volume to keep the boys fresh. Short and sharp. Friday dropped to a captain's run (the light pre-match walk-through) at 63 percent. Saturday was the match. Sunday was recovery, reviews, and medicals. Four training days and a match. Thursday ran 32 percentage points hotter than pre-season's peak. We kept Tue and Thu apart because they're both heavy on the nervous system, and Thursday sits far enough from Saturday to recover but close enough to stay sharp.
The in-season block held 85 percent of pre-season's volume, but we didn't average that volume across the week. We pulled the week down to four training days plus a match, and pushed one of those days 32 percentage points past pre-season's hottest day. Quality concentrated, not preserved.
Position-group retention
The squad-mean number hides a useful detail. Different position groups run different distances and accumulate different work, and the question of "did we maintain volume" is really four questions, one per group. If the closing-twenty pattern depends on conditioning, it should show up across positions, not only in the backs. Props are on the pitch in the closing twenty too.
All four groups retained 80 to 91 percent of their pre-season volume through the in-season block. Halves and outside backs sit at the top of the absolute distance numbers, as expected. Tight-five forwards run the least in absolute terms (15,227 metres pre-season, 13,523 in-season), but their 89% retention rate is on par with the rest of the squad. The forwards weren't training a different program, in volume terms; they were training the same program scaled to their match demands.
The high-speed-running retention numbers (67 to 83%) are slightly lower than total-distance retention. Speed-specific work peaks in pre-season and settles into a maintenance band through the season. That's the expected pattern, and it's the right way around if your goal is to be physically prepared at week 30 rather than week 4.
All four groups retained in the same band. The volume answer to "did we hold the work through the season" is yes, across positions.
The chronic baseline
The weekly view is noisy. A single deload week pulls the line down, a hard week pulls it up, and the variance buries the signal. The truer read is the chronic baseline, the trailing rolling mean of the player's load over the recent weeks.
Most teams that track this use a 4-week chronic. My companion injury-prediction work on this same data picks the right player about 63% of the time on a 12-week chronic; the textbook 4-week version gets it right 57% of the time. So 12 weeks is the more meaningful number to plot, and it tracks the load each player carried into a given week. The injury piece sits in a separate post.
The chronic line builds through pre-season, peaks in week 16 at 13,819 metres, and then holds. In-season chronic mean across weeks 8 to 30 was 12,783, sitting in a tight 10 to 14k band. Twenty of the twenty-three in-season weeks held above 90 percent of peak. Late-season mean (weeks 31 to 35) came in at 13,011, ninety-four percent of the in-season peak.
Once the squad stops training, the chronic line falls. While they were training, it did not.
Across the competitive block, the chronic held within ten percent of its in-season peak almost continuously. The closing-twenty number is consistent with that kind of chronic profile.
Tagging sessions against match pace
The squad mean and the weekly shape only mean something if you have a benchmark for what match running actually looks like. Without one, "we ran 7,684 metres on a Tuesday" is just a number.
The benchmark I used through the year is match game speed at 110 metres per minute of ball-in-play time, with a paired intensity benchmark of 1.1. Those are the standard BIP values I work to. Squad full-match m/min in 24/25 D2 sat at about 70 m/min full-clock; the BIP figure of 110 is the running rate during the time the ball is actually in play, with stoppages stripped out. Every full-squad session, and every drill inside it, was tagged as a percentage of that 110 m/min speed and 1.1 intensity. The weekly shape in Figure 02 is built on those tags.
Pre-season Tuesdays sat at 110 percent of match game speed and pre-season Fridays at 102 percent. Both above match pace. In-season the brief shifted. Tuesday became 126 percent and Thursday 148 percent. Both well past match pace, both deliberately. The thinking: if the squad has rehearsed 148 percent of game speed every Thursday, 100 percent in a match feels submaximal. The 80 minutes is something the body has already seen at a higher intensity.
This is the part of the program I'd defend most strongly. The closing-twenty number is the downstream test of it.
What one of those days looked like
A Thursday at 148 percent of match pace isn't 80 minutes of running flat out. It's a sequence of drill blocks, each with its own intensity tag, ordered so the heaviest blocks land when the squad is warm but not yet emptied out.
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. The thinking is straightforward. If the squad has rehearsed operating above match pace under live defensive load every Thursday, 100 percent in a real match feels easier than the rehearsal. We'd close with a short game-scenario block at full structure to recalibrate quality, then bring the heart rate down.
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.
The single biggest training days, weeks, and how they sit against matches
Across the year, the heaviest training output sat above the heaviest match output.
The biggest single match for a Kintetsu starter in D2 24/25 was Tom Hendrickson's 7,932 metres against Kamaishi in Round 9, ninety-three minutes of football. The biggest single training session for an individual that season was Hayato Yokoi's 11,092 metres on the Friday of pre-season week 5. A hard pre-season Friday put roughly 40 percent more metres in one player's legs than the hardest match any starter played all season.
The same shape holds at the squad-mean level. The squad-mean per-player league-match distance was 5,049 metres. The squad-mean for the hardest training day of the year, Thursday of pre-season week 4, was 7,633 metres per active player. Training squad-mean at peak sat about 50 percent above match squad-mean.
The biggest individual training week of the season was Koji Okamura's 29,520 metres in pre-season week 5. The biggest individual training week-and-a-half (back-to-back peak fortnight) was Daisuke Noguchi's 27,815 metres in week 1 followed by 27,953 metres in week 5. Five players cleared 27,000 metres in a single pre-season week. The biggest squad-mean week in the figure data is wk 2 at 20,182 metres; the biggest in-season week is wk 16 at 20,149 metres, within 33 metres of the pre-season top week.
Per match, m/min squad-mean was 70 m/min full-clock, with Halves at 73.6 m/min and Tight Five at 66.2 m/min. The highest individual full-match m/min in the season was Hendrickson again, at 89.0 m/min against NEC in Round 13. None of those match figures are themselves elite by international standards. The gap to training is the point. Every starter has seen training days that put more metres and more m/min in their legs than the hardest match of the season asked for.
What I'll change next season
Push retention from 85 to 90 percent. If 85% retention produced this season's closing-twenty number, the question worth asking is whether 90% produces more. The cost is small and the measurement is straightforward: the closing-twenty net either moves up next year or it doesn't. Either answer is useful.
Hold the in-season weekly shape. The Tue-Thu volume/quality split with Thursday at 148% looks like the feature doing the most late-game work in this dataset. Keep it, and resist averaging volume across more days.
Tighten the match-pace tagging. The 110 m/min BIP benchmark is a single fixed number across positions and across phases. A more honest version would tag against position-specific match m/min, Halves and Outside Backs at the higher end, Tight Five at the lower, and adjust the percentages accordingly. Same training, more accurate label.
What this post can't tell me
This is one season at one club. I do not have league-average periodisation data to benchmark against, and I would want at least two more seasons before treating these magnitudes as stable. The 110 m/min BIP benchmark is also a single squad-wide figure; a position-specific version would be more honest, and the same dataset would build it.
What I can defend is the descriptive picture. Kintetsu's 2025 program was a high-retention, in-season-heavy program tagged session by session against a match-pace benchmark. It produced the closing-twenty net result reported in the previous post.
Coming next: the contact and gym side of the same year. The running side is what's here: hold the chronic, concentrate the quality, train above match pace.