The first block of a pre-season is the least exciting part of the training year, and it is the part everything later sits on. Here is the order that works, and the order most people actually use.
The first block is aerobic. Easy running, most weeks, at a pace you could hold a conversation at. That's it. It is dull to do and duller to read about, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Intervals and repeat sprints work. They work best on legs that already have a base underneath them, and they are what people reach for first because they feel like training. Easy running does not feel like training until about week five, when the hard sessions you add start going better than they used to.
Boring first. Sharp later.
Two lifting sessions a week, every week, beats four sessions at the start and none by the time the season arrives. The consistency is the point, not the session design. Two thirty-minute sessions you actually do outperform an ambitious four-day split you abandon. Nor does any of it need a gym: the swaps that hold up cover every pattern without one.
The evidence for strength work is the strongest in this area. Across 25 randomised trials and 26,610 participants, strength training programs cut sports injuries to under a third of the rate in the control groups. Stretching programs, measured the same way in the same review, changed nothing at all. Lauersen JB, Bertelsen DM, Andersen LB. The effectiveness of exercise interventions to prevent sports injuries. Br J Sports Med. 2014;48(11):871-877. PubMed 24100287. The authors say plainly that the overall effect estimate was heterogeneous, and the figure is "to under a third", not "by a third", which is a different and much-repeated claim.
The most useful finding in pre-season research is not about how to train. It is about how often you finish what you planned.
In a professional rugby league squad tracked across one 17-week pre-season, ten extra completed sessions went with 17 percent lower odds of injury the following week, controlling for that week's training load. Windt J, Gabbett TJ, Ferris D, Khan KM. Training load-injury paradox. Br J Sports Med. 2017;51(8):645-650. PubMed 27075963. Thirty elite players, so it describes a full-time squad rather than somebody fitting sessions around work. The direction is worth having anyway.
Not ten harder sessions. Ten more of them, actually completed. Of everything in a pre-season, that is the variable most under your control, and it is the one that responds to building a week you can realistically finish.
Add one thing at a time, so that when something goes well or goes wrong you know which change did it. Two new stressors in the same week tell you nothing. How many weeks you get for all of it is arithmetic from round 1.
They start at week 9. Sprints and hard running in the first week back feel like progress in a way that easy running never does, and that is why the first fortnight of a pre-season is where the soft-tissue injuries live.
There is no version of this where you skip the base and keep it.
If the first month feels slow, that is not a sign you have got it wrong. It is very nearly the only sign you have got it right.
The off-season build phase runs exactly this order: aerobic base running and hypertrophy-biased lifting first, hard running introduced as the phase goes on, and the sharpening left until the phase after it. You don't choose the order, and you can't accidentally start at week 9.
How the phases are worked out, and what each one is for, is on how the plan is built.
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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