Most pre-season plans fail on arithmetic rather than on principle. The sessions are fine; there are just more of them than the week holds. Here is a week that fits.
Four sessions you finish beats six you plan.
A hard run the day after a heavy lift is two hard days in a row wearing different clothes. Your legs do not keep separate accounts for which session the fatigue came from.
Alternate them instead. Lift, easy run, lift, hard run, rest, and the week suddenly has room in it. The ordering does more for how the hard sessions go than the content of the hard sessions does.
Recovery is the space between sessions, not a session.
Once club pre-season resumes, a club night is a hard session whether or not it appears on your own plan. Two club nights and a match is most of a week already, and a plan that adds four sessions on top of it is not a plan, it is a wish.
Count what the club takes before you add anything. This is the single most common way a good individual program turns into an injury: it was written for the week you had in November and never revised for the week you have in March. The size of the step is what the load research points at, not the size of the week, and the week after the quiet month is the same problem at the other end of the year.
Not a compromise, not a maintenance dose. A session. Most of what a football pre-season needs fits into half an hour, provided the half hour is not spent on the parts that do not matter.
The assessment asks how long you have, and the answer is one of four: thirty minutes, forty-five, sixty, or seventy-five plus. Sessions are built to the length you picked rather than trimmed down from a longer one, so a thirty-minute session is a complete session and not the first half of an hour.
When the week does not fit, something has to go, and it should not be the thing you decide on the night. An easy run is last in every sense: it only earns a spot once the match, the club nights and both lifts have had theirs.
In-season, the easy run only appears if at least fifteen minutes of the week's running budget survives your match and your club training. A player with two club nights usually has neither the day nor the minutes, so their week is the fixture, the club nights and two short lifts, and the plan says so rather than stacking a run on top of it.
The in-season week is anchored to match day rather than to Monday. How the plan is built sets out where each day lands.
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.
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