How long should your learning blocks be?

How should we structure our training blocks? And how long should we focus on specific principles or moments of the game?

As always, context is king. The environment in which you coach, the people you coach, and those you coach with, will all shape the what, when and why of all of your coaching.

If you are coaching in a program that gives you contact time of 1-3 sessions a week, this would be my guidance, and the principles and questions I would be thinking about, when planning my learning blocks.

Duration

We want to create an opportunity for players to recall and retrieve their prior learning.

This helps us consider the number of weeks we commit to working on specific moments of the game, as well as an individual’s skillset.

We want our players to commit new information to their long-term memory. My advice would be to work on a 4-6 week cycle, as this gives sufficient time to explore and add layers to the themes and principles you want to pursue. 

At the same time, you should leave enough time between different sessions to enable players to recall prior lessons that have been learned.

Let’s bring this to life.

You want to spend six weeks covering two principles in attack – for example, playing to space and speed of ball at the breakdown – and two principles in defence, such as connections in defence and contest in the tackle/breakdown area.

You don’t need to cover all four principles in every session explicitly. You can put the crosshairs on one attacking and one defensive principle each session, but then seek opportunities to retrieve one of the other principles that may have been covered in the first few weeks.

An example can be found in the table below – note, the sessions are working attack versus defence, because they don’t work in isolation.