Most players think the goal of training is to replicate match intensity ⬇️

The well-coached teams train more deliberately than that, they aim to consistently go above it.

Not in every session, but in their hardest ones.

If players are covering on average 150 metres per minute for the top inter-county teams, then their heaviest pitch session of the week is designed to get them hitting 160-170m/min.

It's a specific physiological strategy, and it's standard practice in elite sports like AFL.

It works because the body adapts to the highest stress it regularly encounters.

If the hardest thing you ever do is a match, then matches will always feel hard.

But if training consistently exceeds match demands, games start to feel manageable by comparison.

This is what the Derry S&C setup is engineering.

The physical buffer it builds means players arrive to championship with a reserve they wouldn't have if training only ever matched the game.

They operate with a wave pattern in terms of training intensity.

For their three main pitch sessions, none of them are the same.

One is done at roughly 80% of matchday load, one dropped to 70%, then one pushed up to match demands or above - over 10k total distance, over 2.5k at high speed running.

This is deliberate and shows the benefits of having GPS.

You can't sustain 160m/min across every session without accumulating fatigue that eventually causes the player to break down with injuries.

The variation is what makes the high-load session possible - you're recovered enough to actually hit the numbers, which is the only way the adaptation happens.

This is the part most club setups get wrong.

They either go hard every session and players turn up to games carrying accumulated fatigue, or they're inconsistent and never actually stress the system enough to drive adaptation.

Neither produces the physical buffer Derry are trying to build.

Yes, they lost the Ulster semi-final to Monaghan. No, that doesn't mean their S&C work is wrong.

Another interesting factor to note is that while GPS tracks distance, speed, and acceleration, it doesn't track the cost of changing direction.

I recently came across this interesting video from Hudl about how we need to move beyond linear metrics when tracking GPS data to understand the true demands of multidirectional sports.

Worth a watch.