Kelly Penfold is currently the speed and conditioning coach for the St George Illawarra Dragons NRL team and perhaps one of the first full-time female S&C coaches at first grade NRL level. She has previously been the Head of S&C at the Queensland Firebirds and a longtime coach at QAS with Olympic sports, and in particular field hockey. She is an ASCA Elite L3 coach and was also awarded the 2023 ASCA Coach of the Year Award.

QUOTES

“The off-feet conditioning piece for me is around the ability to add a style of energy system conditioning and potentially a tissue loading component when athletes are not able to impact loading”

“For triathletes, you've got junior athletes that essentially have come out of probably a high school system or development system and they're going to the junior elite or elite phase and they might've been running 25-30kms in a week and they've got to up to 80-100kms for men and probably 40-60kms for women… so you want to let them plateau at a certain volume for a little while before you then try to bump them up to make sure they've really just adjusted to that load and the volume.”

“It's actually probably the reason why I decided to pay more attention to this because I caught myself out just doing the old rinse and repeat of, I'm just going to give them a 20 seconds on 40 seconds off eight times over and then a 15 on 15 off six times over.”

“If you truly trying to build out an athlete’s lactate threshold or if you're trying to build out like their aerobic capacity or, you know, even working on getting them back to some high speed sprinting, you really need to make that just a bit more precise about what you're trying to achieve and how you're going to get there”

“We'll look at heart rate and if it is reflecting the zone that athletes are supposed to be working in? And then can you consequently up your effort? And we can look at how your heart rate adjusts to that effort and build that across a six to eight week period to see if you're actually tolerating the session better than you have been previously.”

“I probably steer clear a bit of zone 3 (70-80%) work, kind of in the middle of aerobic, kind of in the middle of working at really high intensities and that just seems to take an overall really high toll on people and trying to get the timing right of how long you actually get them to hold that for as well, it can be quite tricky. So trying to not totally burn them out and push them too far past that area is really quite hard to control in zone 3 so usually I'm trying to work at a base level up to a more of a top level percentage of heart rate.”

“I think the big thing for me is if you have the time and the reason we have aerobic intervals is generally because we don't have as much time with the athlete to do like and hour to hour and a half long sessions. But ideally if you have the time, going up over that 45 minute mark for your total session is going to be optimal.”

SHOWNOTES

1) Kelly’s background and update since the last episode

2) What is off-feet conditioning and why S&C coaches should be experts in it

3) When to build and stabilize at certain training volume thresholds for athletes

4) Common issues with off-feet conditioning, ensuring the precision around getting the desired adaptations is as high as possible and basic rules around energy system development.

6) Using a conditioning needs analysis for training prescription and the interplay between heart rate and wattage

7) The nuances of using heart rate and measuring heart rate recovery based on time taken to get back to zone 2

8) Practical examples of conditioning sessions and making sure the rest periods are long enough for max efforts

9) Building precision around the adaptations you’re getting with athletes