Two sessions a day with no gap between them

The double day is planned around facility bookings, and the space to refuel between them disappears.

Morning session finishes at half eleven. Afternoon session starts at one. The pitch is booked, the video meeting sits in the middle, and somewhere in there the athlete is meant to eat a meal, digest it, and be ready to sprint. That gap was not designed. It is what was left over.

Double days are not the problem. They are a reasonable way to fit volume into a week and they let you separate qualities that do not belong in the same session. The problem is that the second session inherits whatever the first one left behind, and coaches plan the two sessions as if they were independent because they are usually planned by two different people.

The refuelling window is the obvious casualty, but it is not the only one. Attention is a resource too. A group that has had ninety minutes of hard work, a shower, a meeting and a rushed meal is not capable of learning anything technically new at one o'clock, so putting the new material there is a waste of the best coaching content of the week. Yet that slot is often given to whatever was left on the plan.

The scheduling fix is unglamorous. Decide which session is the priority and protect it. Give the other one a job that survives a compromised athlete, which usually means repetition of things already known rather than acquisition of something new. Make the gap long enough for actual food, and if it cannot be, make the first session shorter rather than pretending the gap is adequate.

And feed people in the building. An athlete sent away to find their own lunch in seventy minutes will return with something they bought at a petrol station, which is a predictable outcome and therefore a coaching failure rather than an athlete failure.

The bit that annoys me most is that double days get defended on the grounds of professionalism, as though volume itself were the virtue. Two sessions separated by nothing are frequently worse than one good one. The second is performed by a tired, underfed athlete at a lower quality, which is the definition of practising badly.

Book the gap before you book the pitch. Nobody does it, and the gap is where the work actually gets absorbed.