After your last game, the correct amount of structured training is none. Not light training. None. Walk, swim, play something else, or do nothing at all, for two to three weeks.
The fear is that a few weeks off undoes a year. It doesn't, and the two halves of your fitness behave quite differently across a short break.
Strength holds up well across a short break. Endurance fades faster, and recently acquired gains go first, while long-standing fitness stays above untrained levels. Mujika I, Padilla S. Detraining: loss of training-induced physiological and performance adaptations, Parts I and II. Sports Med. 2000;30(2):79-87 and 30(3):145-154. PubMed 10966148. There is a widely quoted percentage for how much fitness is lost in how many weeks. It is not quoted here, because it does not appear in either abstract, and the figures in circulation are other people's paraphrases.
Running fitness fading faster is not an argument against the break. It comes back faster too, and rebuilding it is precisely what the off-season block exists to do.
What does not recover on its own is the accumulated wear of a full season, and the only thing that addresses it is time you do not spend training.
A break is two or three weeks, planned, at a known point in the year, with a date it ends on. Stopping is what happens in the middle of a pre-season when you started at somebody else's pace and ran out.
Take the break on purpose and you won't need one later.
When the reset ends, the off-season block begins with easy running and two lifts a week. Not because it is a gentle way back in, but because it is the base that everything after it is built on. Where a pre-season actually starts is that block in full.
Post-season reset is a phase like any other, with its own dates, and it is the only phase in the app that tells you not to train hard. It ends when the calendar says it ends rather than when you feel ready, which is the point of putting it on a calendar.
Footy Ready builds this into a plan around your dates, your body and the gear you actually have. The assessment, your whole season across all six phases, and one real session generated from your own answers are free.
iPhone only. No account and no sign-in.
