Annual Plan for Team Sports v1.0
This is the Excel workbook aimed at helping team sport coaches setting up the annual plan and weekly/monthly calendar.
The workbook is organized in couple of tabs. Two main tabs are Annual Plan and Training Sessions. All other tabs are related to components of the annual plan and include drop down lists and weighting factors used to calculate training load.
The worksheet utilize some VBA code for estimating training load. For example, if one uses 1x4x4’ R:3’ small sided game (4v4), that represents doing one set of four reps of 4 minutes interval with 3 minutes rest. VBA code is used to parse the data from the string and calculate load in A.U. (arbitrary units). Using weighting factors one could assign different weight to different components and calculate total load.
Visualizing workloads using sparklines is a neat way to see the progression (overall, or within the components – use check boxes to select what you want to be calculated and visualized) in load over time and see the differences between weeks. The formula for load in A.U. is quite simple: it is Load = Work_Time * Density, where Density is Work_Time / Total_Time. Not perfect, but get's the job done. For this reason it is crucial to assign different weighting factors for different drills within each training component (strength, speed, power...) and for each component in the total load. I have set up a table for Strength, Specific conditioning and General conditioning tab where one could see calculated loads. Using Solver tool (add-in) in Excel or Goal Seek one could select certain drills to have certain load. I will cover this in one of the how-to videos.
The annual plan (Annual Plan tab) and daily calendar (Training Sessions tab) are connected in a way that you can see key constraints (games related data, camps, travel, vacation and testing) devised in the annual plan in the daily calendar for a given week. This allows for easier planning of a given week (microcycle).
The basic version is set up to be used in soccer, but by modifying the names of the boxes in the Annual plan and drop down lists for each training component one can adjust if for their own needs and their sports.
On the bottom of the page I posted four instructional videos on how to use the Annual Plan for Team Sports v1.0, although I believe that most of it is quite intuitive especially for coached used to plan/work in Excel.
For further customizations of the workbook please be free to contact me.
I am offering the Annual Plan for Team Sports workbook at $45
