Weekly Review 14th – 20th Feburary 2011 “schedule, bale & overtraining”

 Overtraining

One word to describe this week was quiet. Training as always, but over the last few weeks I’ve began to feel like I’ve been overtraining. It’s not a physical problem, but a mental one. The last 10 months I’ve been on a 20 hour a week schedule which makes you calculate every single day, how many hours you have to do, etc and I never let myself get away with anything. Even if I am really tired, weak, want to go to bed and it’s cold and snowing outside (well I don’t mind that 😀 ). I guess discipline is a good thing, but I’ve been feeling like you can lose motivation from being on this schedule too long. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had a period over the last year or so, where I’ve stopped calculating the hours I have to do, and scheduling time, and just let myself go for a little bit. It’s not the training’s with club that bothers me, it’s forcing to work all by myself on the pitch and forcing myself to watch and analyse games. There’s no doubt this work is definitely paying off and progressing my skills but I just feel that it can detrimental to football, to do what I prefer not to do every day, repeating the same movements over and over.

But maybe this is a good thing at the same time. Because you don’t get pleasure without pain. You don’t succeed without hard work. Maybe I need to train even more! I think I need to re-focus, re-channel my ambition and thoughts.

So I’ve thought, maybe I should switch it up and live life next week without a schedule and do as I feel, so I feel a little refreshed. Not counting the hours all the time. I’m on holidays next week as well. What I dream of is the day I sign a professional contract, when I’ve achieved the hardest step. Then I will take a long vacation.

I’ve had other thoughts on my mind and they are similar to what I said back in June last year

I was watching an nikefootball interview with Arsene Wenger the other day, and when asked what he looks for in a player he said:
“none of us is perfect…what makes a player go to the top is that he has one quality“.

I have a few strengths  like shooting, dribbling and speed, but I don’t know what my one single best quality is, I’m gonna think about it and then once I find it, I’ll work on it every day.

I still have this issue of my one biggest quality. I think it is speed. When I’m playing for my adult team, I hear they comment on how fast I am. But that’s in the 4th division of the Hungarian league, I don’t know how it would compare to the Premier league or Bundesliga. But in the short-term while I’m going for lower league clubs, speed is that quality I should show the most. It’s what stands out. To show my speed, I should make as many runs as I can, left and right wings. Try receive the ball when I’m in motion rather than receiving the ball flat footed and then making a sprint, because I seem to always lose the ball like that. Or, keep the ball in fast motion and keep moving, don’t stop. Get it out of my feet and in the grass behind the defenders. At the same time, get one of my stinging, powerful shots away, or accurate cross and putting on pressure on defenders high up the pitch. For now, I’ve decided that’s my football style.

If I had to compare myself to one player, it would be Gareth Bale, but right footed.

Finally, I decided to create a Recovery plan, because now that I’m playing more games and such, it’s important to follow one. One thing that I found is that everyday I’m drinking on average 1.5 liters of water per day, when you should be drinking 2. I read somewhere that you should be drinking 3 – 5 liters everyday if your an athlete. Sometimes I will not drink any water at all (just juice and tea, or something). So from Tuesday to Sunday, I’m going to commit drinking 3 liters of water everyday and drinking a 250ml protein shake once a day, after training and see how I feel and if I have more energy. I also skip breakfast, so I’m gonna stop doing that next week too.

Also played a game, 45 minute, with the b-team for some reason. Not going to comment on it, not worth it.

Next Week

I did 18.5 hours of training last week, A LOT was game analysis. I felt that I needed more structure in my personal sessions. A specific thing or style I work on, rather than just say something and not ending up doing it. This week, as I have more freedom without a schedule, I’ll think of what I could do and imitate Gareth Bale, as well as maybe a young Ryan Giggs, Adam Johnson, James Milner.