Training intensity - good rest settings? Pre-season and beyond.

[danej]

Suggestions regarding good rest settings (training intensity)?

 

I mean the automatic setting at the training panel, the one with dive hearts, two red one to the left, yellow in the middle, two green one towards the right.

 

I assume that good settings could vary throughout the season. Perhaps tougher settings during pre-season than during the regular season. Perhaps easier settings during times with congestured fixtures.

 

I done a lot of research on this but it is difficult to find trustworthy specific suggestions.

 

Edited July 17, 2022 by danej

[mibsweden]

I would keep it at the settings that are there from the start.

[rsihn]

There really isn't one answer for this because it is going to be highly dependent on the quality of your medical staff, full/part time status, age of your players, and the amount of matches you are playing along with match congestion.  Let's deal with these one by one.

1-Quality of medical staff.  This one should be obvious.  Higher quality  medical staff will allow you to increase the intensity of training as they are better able to keep your players healthy and fit. 

2-Full or part time status.  Part time status allows you to train your players harder since you are only training twice a week rather than every day.  You generally don't have to worry about your players fitness as they have a day off between training days and matches for recovery. 

3-Age of your players.  Older players (30+) struggle with high intensity training and may need more rest days between matches.  You may see a steep decline in older players if you continue to push them with heavy training and match load like you do for your younger players.  My current team has a number of 30-36 year old players and some are actually improving due to the way I've set up our auto training settings to give a rest day to anyone in the lowest 3 of 5 condition tiers to accommodate them.  This might have a slight detrimental effect on the development of our younger players in the squad though but they are still developing satisfactorily.  You are going to have to strike a balance between what works for one segment of your squad and what works for the other.  

4-Match congestion.  This is something that needs to be factored in along with your medical staff's recommendation.  My squad will generally bump up double intensity training for our top condition setting during pre-season and during international weeks when no matches are being played while having to drop back down to normal during normal weeks where we have 1 or 2 matches.  It is in a constant state of flux and you should consult your medical staff's recs to try to find a balance that covers the largest majority of your squad.  There will still likely be some outliers that you might consider setting manually, paying particular attention to older players and players who have just returned from injury.  

[Kloppy]

I keep it the same rest intensity as default. I get just too many injuries specifically in pre-season when I'm using double intensity when fully fit. Although for my academy I will use double intensity when fully fit to get more development as I'm not too worried about fitness at that level.

[danej]

12 hours ago, rsihn said:

4-Match congestion.  This is something that needs to be factored in along with your medical staff's recommendation.  My squad will generally bump up double intensity training for our top condition setting during pre-season and during international weeks when no matches are being played while having to drop back down to normal during normal weeks where we have 1 or 2 matches.  It is in a constant state of flux and you should consult your medical staff's recs to try to find a balance that covers the largest majority of your squad.  There will still likely be some outliers that you might consider setting manually, paying particular attention to older players and players who have just returned from injury.  

Great post overall. This last point made me wonder, what level do you currently play at? I ask because a lot of people seem to advocate usually having the top tier (right) / full heart rest setting on double intensity. I wonder whether it depends on the level of players, their natural fitness perhaps. Perhaps double intensity is a worse choice in lower leagues at least during 2 matches per week patches.

[glengarry224]

On 22/07/2022 at 11:11, rsihn said:

There really isn't one answer for this because it is going to be highly dependent on the quality of your medical staff, full/part time status, age of your players, and the amount of matches you are playing along with match congestion.  Let's deal with these one by one.

1-Quality of medical staff.  This one should be obvious.  Higher quality  medical staff will allow you to increase the intensity of training as they are better able to keep your players healthy and fit. 

2-Full or part time status.  Part time status allows you to train your players harder since you are only training twice a week rather than every day.  You generally don't have to worry about your players fitness as they have a day off between training days and matches for recovery. 

3-Age of your players.  Older players (30+) struggle with high intensity training and may need more rest days between matches.  You may see a steep decline in older players if you continue to push them with heavy training and match load like you do for your younger players.  My current team has a number of 30-36 year old players and some are actually improving due to the way I've set up our auto training settings to give a rest day to anyone in the lowest 3 of 5 condition tiers to accommodate them.  This might have a slight detrimental effect on the development of our younger players in the squad though but they are still developing satisfactorily.  You are going to have to strike a balance between what works for one segment of your squad and what works for the other.  

4-Match congestion.  This is something that needs to be factored in along with your medical staff's recommendation.  My squad will generally bump up double intensity training for our top condition setting during pre-season and during international weeks when no matches are being played while having to drop back down to normal during normal weeks where we have 1 or 2 matches.  It is in a constant state of flux and you should consult your medical staff's recs to try to find a balance that covers the largest majority of your squad.  There will still likely be some outliers that you might consider setting manually, paying particular attention to older players and players who have just returned from injury.  

Great post.  Adjusting for these factors, in pre-season and often during the first half of the season, especially if the schedule is not packed, I'll set something like this:

If the first half of the season is more congested, I'll do something more like:

In the second half of the season, especially if the match schedule is congested, I'll reduce to this or similar:

I think that Double Intensity for the full green heart is ok until players start showing fatigue, especially if you still want to develop players who are not playing as much:  for example, you have some young players in your senior squad who are playing rarely or only coming in as subs.  For starters who are overworked, I'll individually give them days of 'no pitch or gym work' or individually lower their intensity.

[rsihn]

On 23/07/2022 at 01:50, danej said:

Great post overall. This last point made me wonder, what level do you currently play at? I ask because a lot of people seem to advocate usually having the top tier (right) / full heart rest setting on double intensity. I wonder whether it depends on the level of players, their natural fitness perhaps. Perhaps double intensity is a worse choice in lower leagues at least during 2 matches per week patches.

 

As I said in my earlier post, there isn't one all encompassing answer for you and I listed the reasons that make it so.  I'm not really concerned with what a lot of people have to say.  You've got medical staff in the game and they give you advice on the Rest page as to what intensity they feel you can safely train your players on a weekly basis and this changes on a near continuous basis.  You should be checking and adjusting training intensities on a weekly basis, in my opinion. particularly for players who have just returned from injury as they need to be manually set to Half intensity as the auto settings are not able to capture this unique situation and you don't want the player to be re-injured.  To make it easy to remember, just make the training intensity adjustment part of your routine on Fridays when you already criticize or praise training.  My question for you is why you are ignoring your medical staff's advice in favor of what some random people say on the internet who as you admit, may be playing with vastly differing quality of staff, players, and facilities?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[danej]

11 hours ago, rsihn said:

 

As I said in my earlier post, there isn't one all encompassing answer for you and I listed the reasons that make it so.  I'm not really concerned with what a lot of people have to say.  You've got medical staff in the game and they give you advice on the Rest page as to what intensity they feel you can safely train your players on a weekly basis and this changes on a near continuous basis.  You should be checking and adjusting training intensities on a weekly basis, in my opinion. particularly for players who have just returned from injury as they need to be manually set to Half intensity as the auto settings are not able to capture this unique situation and you don't want the player to be re-injured.  To make it easy to remember, just make the training intensity adjustment part of your routine on Fridays when you already criticize or praise training.  My question for you is why you are ignoring your medical staff's advice in favor of what some random people say on the internet who as you admit, may be playing with vastly differing quality of staff, players, and facilities?

 

Let me just clarify that I am rather inexperienced with the game. I learn all the time. Pretty much on a weekly basis I learn stuff that I didn't know before and change my way of playing the game. I probably ask dumb questions and say dumb things on a regular basis (to the experienced players). Unknown unknowns.

 

In any case, I have been thinking much of the same lately. That it might be difficult to have rigid settings and just leave the players to it.

 

More specifically I am considering having pretty much the default settings, but frequently changing the settings manually, following the recommendation from the physio. At least weekly, perhaps daily or almost daily, it is just a couple of clicks anyway, letting the physio decide the individual intensity.

 

Btw. I wonder what happens to rest settings for the U23 and U18 teams (England) if I am not in charge of team training myself. I don't really want to be in charge of team training, or any training for that matter. Prefer to keep the game as simple as possible. However, at the same time I would like my players to progress at a decent pace. It would be a shame for example, if needlessly few young U23 + U18 players trained on double intensity even if the physio recommends it for the player.

 

I am also wondering whether the training intensity setting should be heavier during the boot camp-style start of pre-season. I have no clue. Logically you could argue both ways. You could argue that pushing the players even more is good as perhaps part of the aim of boot camp is to push the players physically to the max as long as they have no fatigue. On the other hand you could argue that a boot camp / heavy physical scheduling is demanding enough as it is, and that it would be overdoing it to add double training intensity on top.

 

Hmm... Now I check a couple of things in game (I am at the start of pre-season, start of the save on July 5th, boot camp time), I see that if I follow physio recommendations and have most first team players on normal intensity to begin with, all or pretty much all players still have a "heavy" total workload. I imagine this implies that I should follow the physio's recommendations also during boot camp. It logically seems risky to take an individual player from normal to double intensity if his workload is already heavy under normal intensity. Plus that all players at the start have high injury risk due to no match sharpness. In a few test runs I made I also seem to often get many injuries if I stick most medium to old aged first team players on double intensity during boot camp.

Edited July 27, 2022 by danej