How often should field hockey players train?

There is no universal number. Matthew Eyles sets his floor at one to three strength sessions a week and one speed session, and says explicitly that one a week is fine if that is all the time there is. Mick Beunen's club translation is three sessions a week and preferably four to prepare a Sunday game. The ceiling is set by recovery rather than enthusiasm, and by the training your players are doing elsewhere.

How do I know if I am overtraining my players?

Compare the last week's load against the last month. Then look for power dropping off, a sprint test coming back slower, players getting sick, and disrupted sleep. Glenn Turner's low-tech version is that fatigue shows up as skill errors first, a missed chop or a pass a metre off, long before a player looks distressed. Session RPE, the session rating out of ten multiplied by the minutes trained, costs nothing and flags the player finding it harder than everybody else.

Should I give tired players a week off?

Matthew Eyles argues against it: deloading to the point of doing nothing is usually counterproductive, and a week off in season probably does more harm than good. He prefers reducing the load, one or two sessions fewer depending on how much the squad trains, over stopping entirely.

How often should my players train before I’m overcooking them?

Quick answer. There is no universal number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing about your squad. What these coaches do agree on is the shape of it. The floor is lower than most coaches think: once a week in the gym and once a week of real speed work will do a lot. The ceiling is set by recovery rather than enthusiasm. And the load that actually overcooks players is usually the load you cannot see, which is school, work, other sports and the other club they play for. Watch for skill errors and unexplained fatigue rather than waiting for somebody to be sick behind the goal.

That is the short version. Here is how the coaches on The Hockey Site work through it.

The floor is lower than you think. Matthew Eyles works with full-time internationals and still sets the bar somewhere a club coach can reach. In Injury Reduction Training Methods he describes his own programme as “one to three sessions a week, that’s a non-negotiable, at least once a week in the gym, even in tournament modes”, and then translates it down without any hand-wringing: “one to two times a week is great. If one time a week is all you got time for, great.” Speed gets the same treatment. “Speed once a week. Absolute non-negotiable.”

What a club week can actually look like. Mick Beunen runs the Belgian men’s programme, and when asked what a club should do with that he gives a straight answer in Physically game ready: cut the second hockey session, but keep “three sessions at least, and preferably four, to prepare your club game on the Sunday”. He also works in waves rather than a flat line, three weeks of gradual overload followed by one deload week, and he is candid that this is not what he sees elsewhere: it is “something that I don’t always see in international hockey or at club level, either”.

The load you cannot see is the one that hurts. This is the most useful idea on the page and it comes from Phil Moreland’s pre-season masterclass. Looking back at a squad with a serious injury record, his diagnosis was not the programme, it was the blind spot: “we didn’t understand the total load that the athlete was being exposed to. We didn’t know what was going on in Clubland. We didn’t know what was going on for some of our school age kids in their school environment. We haven’t taken into account that the school age athlete might be competing in two or three other sports. And they show up to your training session absolutely cooked, yet we continue to push.” He makes the same point about adults, having coached sides full of carpenters, builders and bricklayers, and asks how you account for the physicality of somebody’s job before you write their week.

So the fix starts with a conversation, not a plan. Moreland’s answer was to talk to the other coaches his players reported to, in both directions, so that nobody was writing a week in isolation. If your players belong to a school team and a club and a regional squad, you are one of four people loading them and the only one who can see your quarter of it.

Recovery is not a type of training. Eyles is firm about this and it changes how a week reads: “when I talk about recovery, I don’t talk about recovery training. It’s something that rubs me the wrong way a little bit. For me, you have recovery and you have training. And any training is something that you have to recover from.” Full rest days are scheduled deliberately, “because if you don’t, you’ll build up fatigue, and a build up of fatigue is going to increase that likelihood of injury”.

But do not deload to zero. The instinct when players look tired is to give them a week off, and Eyles thinks that is usually wrong: “deloading to a point of doing nothing is not always the best thing. A week off, especially a week off in season, you’ve got a bye round or something and you give the athletes a week off, it’s probably going to do more harm than good. Deloading your training a little bit, maybe having one or two sessions less depending on how much you train, that might help.”

The sessions you labelled easy are not easy. Glenn Turner describes exactly how a well-planned week quietly turns into an overload in Hockey Conditioning Made Simple: “they always get muddled between, oh, this one’s going to be easy because we’re doing this. But all of a sudden you’re running into deflect corners and you have a mini game at the end because you know as a player you want to play.” The intention was recovery. The session was not.

Training harder can make the numbers worse. Turner’s own example is worth sitting with, because it is not a cautionary tale about somebody else: “my best two examples are both my Olympic cycles. We trained too hard and too much because we became full time athletes. And during the course of the three months before the Olympics my beep test went down. And as an athlete about to go to the Olympics that’s not good physically, but it’s not good mentally either.”

How you spot it before it costs you a season. Eyles gives a practical list. Compare the last week’s load against the last month, and if the week is much heavier you may be overreaching. Then look for power dropping off, a sprint test coming back slower, and two things that sound too simple to matter: “are they getting sick? And what are their sleep patterns like? Because disrupted sleep, lacking in immune system are all signs of overtraining as well.” Turner’s version is the one you can use without any equipment at all. Unfitness and fatigue show up as skill errors first, a missed chop or a pass a metre off, long before anybody looks distressed.

The cheapest monitoring tool is a question. Eyles again: ask the player how hard the session was out of ten, multiply by the minutes they trained, and you have a number. Eight out of ten across a hundred minutes gives 800. If one player is reporting 1,300 for the same session the rest of the squad scored at 800, that is worth a conversation, and you found it without a GPS vest.

If you only see them twice a week. Turner’s prescription for that situation is deliberately undemanding, because the goal is that it actually happens: “This week it’s a 3k run. I don’t care about your time. So this is really important. I need to see you do the run. I don’t care about your time.” He also adds slow running as a recovery tool rather than a punishment: “everyone hates running slow but the benefits are huge and you recover better so you can train better the next day.”

And the sixteen year old playing for five teams. Turner has a script for that conversation, aimed at the player rather than the coach: “I can’t train on the field six days a week as a 16 year old. I could do a running session on Tuesday instead of going to hockey at all. I could do machine work in the gym on a Thursday with my body weight strength stuff and I’m going to be a better athlete for you.” Note who is doing the negotiating there. He wants the player able to make the case.

None of this adds up to a number of sessions. What it gives you is a way of reading your own week, so that when a player starts fading you can work out whether it was your programme, somebody else’s, or the fact that nobody has counted them together. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits, and ask your players what else they are doing before you add anything.