The warm-up is work and it goes uncounted

Coaches describe a session by its main block and quietly ignore the thirty minutes in front of it.

Ask a coach how long yesterday was and you will get an answer about the session. Seventy five minutes. What actually happened was twenty five minutes of movement preparation, seventy five minutes of session, and fifteen minutes of extras afterwards, which is nearly two hours of work being described as one number and planned as one number.

That accounting error has consequences beyond bookkeeping. If the warm up is not counted, it is not designed either, and warm ups drift upwards over time. A new drill gets added because somebody saw it online, the old one stays because nobody wants to remove it, and after two seasons the group is doing a thirty minute preparation that contains two hard efforts and a lot of standing around in a queue.

Standing in a queue is the specific thing I would attack. Watch a normal warm up and count how much of it is spent waiting to do a drill in a line. In many squads it is more than half. That is time in which the athlete is neither getting warm nor learning anything, and in cold weather it is actively undoing the first part.

There is also a fuel argument, which is where this connects to the rest of the day. An athlete who has arrived on a light lunch has a limited amount of easy work in them, and a long warm up spends some of it before the coaching content starts. On a heavy day, that matters. The main block is being performed by somebody who has already worked for half an hour.

So count it. Put the warm up in the load number, name what each part is for, and delete anything that cannot answer the question. If a drill exists because it is traditional, that is not an answer. If it exists to prepare a specific action that appears later in the session, keep it and put it immediately before that action rather than at the front where the effect has faded.

The extras at the end deserve the same treatment. Optional finishing work, done by the keenest athletes, invisible on every plan, and consistently done by exactly the people who are already carrying the most.

A session is everything the athlete did in the building. Most coaching plans describe about two thirds of it.