The basic idea: what football fitness is
Verheijen's starting point is a definition. Classical fitness coaches measure endurance, strength and speed as isolated quantities: oxygen uptake, jumping power, sprint time. Verheijen regards that as the fundamental error.
Football fitness is the ability to repeat football actions at high quality, often. Not running. Not jumping. Football actions: playing a pass, contesting a duel, making a run in behind, triggering a press. A player who in the 80th minute still makes the same decision with the same execution as in the 10th is fit. A player with excellent laboratory values who cannot do that is not.
From that follows Verheijen's action model. Every football action consists of three steps:
1. Communication — the player perceives what team-mates, opponents and the ball are doing.
2. Decision — he chooses an action.
3. Execution — he carries it out.
Fatigue attacks all three steps. A tired player sees less, decides worse and executes less precisely. Whoever trains only the execution — the legs — trains a third. That is why football fitness has to be trained in situations that demand all three steps: in games.
Up to here this is the same conclusion as Frade's. The difference comes now.
The four fitness dimensions
Verheijen breaks football fitness down into four dimensions that differ physiologically and therefore have to be trained differently:
1. Explosiveness. The ability to carry out a single football action at maximum intensity — a sprint, a duel, a change of direction. Physiologically: power, force per unit of time.
2. Maintaining explosiveness over many actions. The ability to hold the quality of the actions over 90 minutes. The player who in the 85th minute still has the sprint he had in the 5th.
3. Recovery between actions. How quickly a player is ready for the next action after an intense one. In football there are often only seconds between two sprints. Whoever recovers faster can sprint more often.
4. Recovery between series. How quickly a player is ready for the next series after a series of intense actions — an attacking phase with several sprints, say.
Each dimension corresponds to a type of game. That is Verheijen's core and his difference from Frade: he says exactly which game trains which dimension.
| Dimension | Game form | Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Explosiveness | Small games, 1v1 to 4v4 | Short, maximum intensity, long rests, few repetitions |
| Maintaining explosiveness | Medium games, 5v5 to 8v8 | Several blocks of medium length, short rests |
| Recovery between actions | Small to medium games with many actions | High action density, short interruptions |
| Recovery between series | Large games, 8v8 to 11v11 | Long blocks, match rhythm, alternating intensity and rest as in a match |
Pitch size steers the intensity. A small pitch with few players: many actions, high explosiveness. A large pitch with many players: long distances, endurance, rhythm. The coach sets the game the way a fitness coach sets a treadmill — but the player is playing football while doing it.
The weekly plan
Verheijen plans not only the week but the season in cycles of several weeks in which the dimensions build on each other. Simplified: first recovery between series, then maintaining explosiveness, then explosiveness. Large forms before small. Volume before intensity.
Within the week he follows rules derived from recovery physiology:
After a match the body needs around 48 hours to recover fully. Training the day after a match is regenerative or does not happen. Intense training starts on the second day after at the earliest.
Before a match the body needs around 48 hours after the last intense session. The day before the match is short and explosive, without fatigue.
Two intense sessions in a row create fatigue that accumulates. Verheijen speaks of accumulated fatigue: a player who never enters the next session fully recovered gets slower over weeks without noticing — until he is injured.
With one match a week that produces a structure resembling the morphocycle of tactical periodisation, but justified physiologically: Sunday match, Monday off or regenerative, Tuesday off or light, Wednesday and Thursday intense with different dimensions, Friday short and explosive, Saturday activation.
With two matches a week it shrinks to a minimum: recovery, one day of preparation, match. Verheijen has repeatedly shown by the numbers that clubs with midweek fixtures cannot really train during the season — and that every attempt to do so anyway produces injuries.
The criticism of overload
Verheijen's best-known position is his criticism of what he calls overload. It is directed at two things.
Too much volume in pre-season. Verheijen has repeatedly shown by the numbers that clubs working with double sessions and high running volumes in summer have more muscle injuries in the autumn. His argument: the base Klopp and Gasperini lay in summer is not a base but a mortgage. The body pays it off when the load of the season is added.
Too little recovery in the season. Coaches who train more after defeats, who put two intense days back to back, who do conditioning the day after a match — all of them, according to Verheijen, produce accumulated fatigue. His formula: less is more. A team that is fresh wins more matches than one that has trained a lot.
The criticism has brought him into conflict. He publicly attributed Guardiola's Bayern injuries in 2013 and 2014 to the training, criticised Wenger's Arsenal for years and attacked Klopp with injury-frequency figures. The coaches concerned have not responded or have dismissed Verheijen as an outsider. But the debate he started has reached sports science: load management relative to the preceding week is the standard today.
Verheijen and Frade: the comparison
Both reject isolated conditioning. Both train fitness in games. Both have a weekly structure with days of different dominants. The differences are nonetheless fundamental.
| Frade | Verheijen | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | The playing model | The football action |
| Justification | Systemic — the player cannot be taken apart | Physiological — the action has measurable dimensions |
| Ordering of games | By principles of the playing model | By fitness dimensions |
| Pre-season | Same week, less complexity | Cycles, volume before intensity, but no overload |
| Recovery | Recovery through specificity | 48-hour rules, accumulated fatigue |
| Precision | Deliberately vague — the coach fills the model | Deliberately precise — the coach follows rules |
| Language | Portuguese academy, complex | Dutch and pragmatic, accessible |
For coaches the difference is practical: Frade demands that the coach has a playing idea and derives everything from it. Verheijen demands that the coach understands which game has which effect and builds the week accordingly. Whoever can do both plans the game by the playing model and chooses its size by the fitness dimension. That is, in practice, what most top clubs do.
The criticism of Verheijen
The tone. With his public attacks Verheijen has generated more attention for his person than for his method. Many coaches reject him without knowing the method. That is his problem, but it has harmed its spread.
The simplification. Verheijen's 48-hour rules and dimensions are memorable, but the physiology is more complex. Individual differences in recovery are large, and the rules do not fit every player. Verheijen knows this and says so, but the teaching often stops at the rules.
The sprint question. As with Frade, the question remains whether games represent top speed sufficiently. Verheijen relies on small forms for explosiveness, but whether maximum sprint speed is reached in them is — as described in conditioning without the ball — disputed in the research. Many clubs add targeted sprints, which Verheijen's model does not provide for.
The evidence for his overload theses. Verheijen's accusations against individual coaches rest on injury numbers that can have other causes too. The link between pre-season and autumn injuries is plausible, but not as clear-cut as he presents it.
No playing model. Verheijen's method says nothing about how a team should play. It orders games by fitness, not by tactics. A coach who applies only Verheijen has a fit team without a playing idea. That is the gap Frade fills.
Application: what you can take from it
This section is our interpretation.
For amateur and youth coaches Verheijen is the most accessible periodisation method, because it works with rules you can apply without a sports-science degree.
Think in actions, not in kilometres
Your team is not fit because it can run 10 kilometres. It is fit when the centre-back still plays the right pass in the 85th minute. After every match, do not ask whether the team faded, but which actions got worse: the decisions, the duels, the sprints. That tells you which dimension is missing.
Use pitch size as the dial
Small pitch, few players: explosiveness. Large pitch, many players: endurance and rhythm. That is the simplest tool in training planning, and it costs nothing. If your team fades at the end of matches, you need more large forms. If it loses the duels, more small ones.
Two sessions, two dimensions
How a week is built in general is covered in training planning.
With Tuesday and Thursday and a Saturday match: Tuesday large and long — recovery between series, match rhythm. Thursday small and explosive — short, hard, long rests, so the team is fresh on Saturday. That is Verheijen's 48-hour rule on an amateur scale, and it contradicts the widespread pattern of doing real work again on Thursday.
The day after the match is off
If your team plays on Sunday, Monday is not a training day. If you have to train on Monday because no other pitch is free: easy, short, with the ball, without duels. Anything else is accumulated fatigue.
Do not train more after defeats
That is the hardest rule. The reflex after a poor performance is punishment through volume. Verheijen says: that produces the next poor performance. A team that has lost needs clarity and freshness, not kilometres.
Pre-season without a mortgage
Four weeks of pre-season with two sessions are eight sessions. Verheijen's logic for that case: large forms first, then medium, then small. Volume before intensity. No runs, no double sessions, no training camp in which the team trains as much in three days as it otherwise does in three weeks.
What to take away
- Football fitness, according to Verheijen, is the ability to repeat football actions at high quality, often — not laboratory values. Every action consists of communication, decision and execution, and fatigue attacks all three.
- Four fitness dimensions — explosiveness, maintaining explosiveness, recovery between actions, recovery between series — correspond to four types of game, steered by pitch size and player numbers.
- The weekly plan follows recovery rules: 48 hours after the match, 48 hours before the match, never two intense days in a row.
- Verheijen's criticism of overload — too much pre-season, too little recovery — has shaped the debate about load management, even if its tone has done it harm.
- Against Frade: physiological rather than systemic, precise rather than vague, without a playing model. The two complement each other.
- Transferable: think in actions, pitch size as the dial, two sessions with two dimensions, the day after the match off, do not train more after defeats, pre-season without a mortgage.
Anyone planning the week in Coach OS can give each session its dimension — large and long on Tuesday, small and explosive on Thursday. Whether the team is fresh on Saturday is decided by the plan, not by the tool.
FAQ: frequently asked questions
Sources and further reading
- Raymond Verheijen: Football Periodisation: Part 1 — the foundation of the method.
- Raymond Verheijen: How Simple Can It Be? — the more accessible presentation with practical examples.
- World Football Academy: course materials and lectures on football periodisation.
- Verheijen's public analyses of injury frequency and training load, scattered across interviews and social media 2012–2020.
- The article of this series on conditioning without the ball, placing Verheijen between Frade and sports science.
A note on the evidence: the description of the method follows Verheijen's own publications. The assignment of game sizes to dimensions in the table is a simplification; Verheijen differentiates more strongly by pitch dimensions, duration and rests.