The week after the quiet month

The season ends, you take a proper break, and then club training resumes and you go from almost nothing to four hard sessions in a week because everybody else is. That week is the one to be careful with, and not for the reason most people assume.

The jump is the problem, not the fitness you lost

It is tempting to read the first hard week back as punishment for the month off. It isn't. The issue is the size of the step between this week and the last month, rather than the absolute amount of work in it.

In elite rugby league players tracked over two seasons, those whose week reached about 1.6 times their rolling four-week average were several times more likely to be injured in the next match. Hulin BT, Gabbett TJ, Caputi P, Lawson DW, Sampson JA. Low chronic workload and the acute:chronic workload ratio are more predictive of injury than between-match recovery time. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(16):1008-1012. PubMed 26851288. Read this one directionally and no further: it is 28 players, the confidence intervals are enormous, and the acute-to-chronic ratio has since been criticised on statistical grounds. It is not a number to go and calculate on yourself.

A bigger base protects you

Here is the half of that finding that usually gets left off. In the same study, players carrying a high steady workload were injured less often, not more. The conclusion is not "train less". It is that a month of steady work is what lets you absorb a heavy week when the fixture list hands you one.

Fitness is the buffer, not the risk.

So what do you actually do

• Come back before club training does, by about a fortnight, so the first hard week is not also your first week.
• Add roughly one session a week, not three. If you finished the break on nothing, two sessions is a full week. A full pre-season week is four.
• Keep the easy running easy. Most people ramp back by making every session moderately hard, which raises the whole week at once and leaves nowhere to go.

None of that is dramatic, and none of it will feel like enough at the time. Ramping in properly costs you a fortnight of feeling underdone and buys you the first month of the season.