I am currently working with elite level basketball players as I develop a three month case study as a requirement for fulfilment of the uksca accreditation. Having scheduled 6 microcycles (each 7 days) for the general preparation phase, a deload week had been incorporated for the seventh week.

Now from the start of training the athletes had complained of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) regularly. Understanding that this is common when beginning resistance exercise I was confident to continue with the volume and intensity of training prescribed. However come week 5, the athletes progression had halted and the loading stopped increasing, with repetition failure on certain exercises, accompanying this one of the athletes had re-injured a sprained ankle  with another having pain in their knee and excessive muscle soreness in their hamstring.

I had a dilemma. Deloading was not scheduled for another week! Having a deload now then returning to general prep for one week would be worthless. Having a two week deload would be unnecessary and would likely lead to detraining. Continuing training for another week may have a seriously negative impact (injuries, overtraining).

Now despite my plans all laid out neatly in excel, colour co-ordinated with graphical representations of load and volume, I had to adapt, in fact I was reacting.

Because I had not monitored some simple measures such as jump height, rating of perceived exertion, sleep etc. I had no idea that the athletes were about to fail and become overly fatigued. So instead of reacting I shall now make sure I am responding.

Reacting = an unanticipated change to plans

Responding = the change of plans decided upon in advance through careful athlete monitoring.

Because girls play basketball too.

In the end I made the decision to bring the deload forward one week and to increase the length of the next phase, however some damage had already been done and it was necessary to decrease volume and intensity during the deload to a magnitude which may have been avoidable. To prevent this from happening in future phases I devised a simple graph to log the athlete’s subjective ratings and CMJ height allowing me to monitor the training strain and adapt in advance. Typically I would choose to reduce the training volume should scores on the subjective measures of sleep, mood and nutrition fall below a total of 9 (ratings out of 5). Volume may also be reduced following a noticeable decline in jump height or a series of maximal scores on the RPE ratings.

AB.