How the plan is built

The method, in full

Footy Ready generates your training instead of handing you a program written for somebody else. There's no machine learning in it and nothing is random: it's a set of rules that read your answers, your dates and the gear you've got, and they run the same way every time. This page is what those rules are.

1. Your season is the fixed point, not the calendar

Most plans start in November because that's when the writer's season started. Footy Ready starts from your round 1 date, counts the phases backwards from it, and carries them forwards through finals. Move the date and the whole structure moves with it.

Six phases come out of that, and every date is a default you can change:

Phase	What it's for
Post-season reset	Genuine rest. This is the one phase that tells you not to train hard.
Off-season build	Aerobic base running, hypertrophy-biased lifting, movement quality, robustness work.
Pre-season 1	Strength and power lifting, running volume climbing, intervals introduced, agility.
Pre-season 2	Repeat-sprint conditioning and speed. Volume tapers as club training load rises.
In-season	Two short maintenance lifts a week, the week anchored to match day, readiness driven.
Finals taper	Sharpen, cut volume, protect freshness. Only if you're playing finals.

In-season, the week doesn't start on Monday. It starts at the match. The day after is easy movement, the main lift lands two days after, a short sharp session sits two days before the next one, and the day before a match does nothing clever. Your club training nights are counted as load, not ignored, which is why an easy run is the last thing placed and only appears if the fixture and the club nights left both a day and enough of the week's running budget free. Two club nights usually means there's no room, and the plan says so rather than stacking a run on top.

2. What your answers actually change

The assessment isn't a personality quiz. Each answer moves a number the generator then has to work inside. For every movement pattern (squat, hinge, push, pull, lunge, trunk) there's a floor and a ceiling of hard sets per week. Running has a weekly minutes floor and ceiling, and a separate budget for hard running that's tracked apart from the easy stuff.

So two players who pick the same code and the same round 1 date don't get the same week, and the differences aren't cosmetic. Over 35 the goal quietly changes from building to staying on the park, because that's the honest goal.

On that last point: in 126 community-level Australian football players followed for a season, those aged 23 and over carried several times the hamstring risk of the younger players in the same cohort. Gabbe BJ, Finch CF, Bennell KL, Wajswelner H. Risk factors for hamstring injuries in community level Australian football. Br J Sports Med. 2005;39(2):106-110. PubMed 15665208. The confidence interval on that figure runs from 1.1 to 14.0, so read it as "it starts earlier than anyone wants to hear", not as a precise multiplier.

3. The check-in, and what it changes today

Five sliders (sleep, energy, soreness, stress, mood) and two questions: did you play or train yesterday, and is there a new niggle. It takes about thirty seconds and it happens before the session rather than after it, which is the only point at which it can change anything.

Every slider runs bad to good in the same direction, so soreness reads from wrecked to no soreness rather than being flipped round the other way. The answers add up to a total, and the total is never shown to you, because a score out of 25 is the readiness number this app deliberately doesn't have, wearing a different hat.

Why ask rather than measure: a review of 56 studies comparing self-reported wellbeing against heart rate, blood markers and performance tests found the questions tracked training load with better sensitivity and consistency than the objective measures did. Saw AE, Main LC, Gastin PB. Monitoring the athlete training response: subjective self-reported measures trump commonly used objective measures. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):281-291. PubMed 26423706. It says self-report tracks load well. It doesn't say self-report predicts injury, and this page isn't going to claim it does.

What comes out is one of three states:

• Green. The session runs as written, with a progression on offer if you want it. An ordinary day where nothing's wrong is green, because a system that flags the average day as compromised never lets anybody get fitter. Most days are green, and that's the intent.
• Amber. The same session, trimmed. Same exercises in the same order, with hard sets and running minutes cut from the back, hard running dropped to tempo, and one more rep left in the tank. It's a reduction of the right session, never a different session generated from scratch.
• Red. The session is swapped for an easy one. No confirmation and no guilt, and the session you were meant to do stays reachable behind a plain link if you disagree. Red is advice. You're the one who knows whether you can train.

Two rules sit above the total, because a sum can hide one catastrophic answer. A single slider at its floor caps the day no matter how good the rest look, and two of them at the floor is red whatever the total says. A new niggle steps the state down once rather than going straight to red, because a niggle is minor by definition and an app that tears up the whole session for one costs itself the honest answer next time.

Saying you played or trained yesterday doesn't change the state at all. It caps intensity on its own: hard running becomes tempo, the effort target eases, the progression nudge is suppressed, and the volume is left alone. It's there to catch load the plan didn't know about, and a fresh athlete who played yesterday can still carry the week's work.

The reason for all of it is written on the session itself, including on the days nothing changed. If the app only explains itself when it takes something away, the explanation reads as an excuse. Explaining a good day is what makes a bad day credible.

4. The rules that never bend

Some of the above is tuning, and it will move. The following aren't settings, defaults or preferences. They're asserted by the test suite, so a build that breaks one doesn't ship.

• No set is ever prescribed to failure. Not in any phase, for any athlete, after any adjustment.
• An amber session is never larger than the green one in any movement pattern, in running minutes, or in intensity.
• A red session contains no hard running and no hard lifting sets.
• A readiness adjustment can ease an effort target and can never tighten one.
• While you've got an area flagged as sore, its work leaves the plan rather than being trained around.
• An exercise ruled out by an injury or by your age never appears on any screen, including in the swap list.
• An unanswered check-in adjusts nothing. It's treated as "not asked", and it never defaults to green.
• Readiness is advice and never a lock. The only hard gate in the app is the safety one above it.

5. Effort in reps left in the tank, not percentages

Volume says how many hard sets a week asks for. Effort says how hard a hard set is, which is what turns "four sets of six to eight" into something you can actually pick a weight for. Footy Ready uses reps in reserve rather than a percentage of a one-rep max, because a percentage needs a tested max, and testing maxes is the thing a community footballer in a shared gym shouldn't be doing.

The band starts loose at the beginning of a phase and tightens as the phase builds. Through a taper it holds at the tight end while volume falls away underneath it, because that's what a taper is and cutting both is just detraining. A deload comes all the way back to the easy end of every band, the same way volume comes back to its floor: a deload that took sets out and still asked you to strain through the rest would be a deload in name only.

6. When you miss a week

The plan redistributes or drops its lowest-priority work and carries on. There's no streak to break, no badge to lose and nothing that tells you off. Your phase position always follows the calendar rather than resuming where you left off, because the season didn't wait either.

A session you did on a day the plan didn't ask for stays on the day you did it, rather than being prescribed again later in the week. That sounds small and it's the difference between a plan that reads your week and one that just resets every Monday.

7. What it doesn't do

The honest list, because a page that only lists strengths isn't describing a product.

• It doesn't diagnose, treat or rehabilitate anything. If the answer is see a physio, it says see a physio.
• It doesn't coach skills, kicking or contact, and it isn't tackle or contact conditioning. It's the strength, running and soft-tissue work that every football code shares.
• It doesn't give you a readiness score out of 100. A number out of 100 tells you nothing you can act on and invites you to chase it. A state and a sentence tell you what changed and why.
• It carries no nutrition or supplement content, and nothing aimed at under-18 athletes ever carries weight-loss framing.
• It isn't a coach. It's a plan that adjusts, which is a smaller and more honest thing.

And one more, on the evidence itself. A 2025 systematic review of 195 studies and more than 1.5 million participants found no association between any lower-extremity strength measure and lower-extremity injury in female athletes, on very low certainty evidence.

Whittaker JL, Räisänen AM, Martin C, et al. Modifiable risk factors for lower-extremity injury. Br J Sports Med. 2025;59(21):1499-1513. PubMed 40908104.

That doesn't make strength work pointless, and it doesn't contradict the trials that tested whole programs rather than strength measures. It does mean the evidence base is thinner and messier than most training content implies. So: train because it makes you better at footy, which is defensible. Footy Ready won't promise it keeps you on the park.