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Health and Movement Science Year 12 · Module 4 · Training for improved performance
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Lesson 10 · Designing the session, part two

Designing a training session: skill, conditioning, tactics and evaluation

A coach has ninety minutes and three blocks to fit into it. The order they choose is not a matter of taste. It follows from two facts about human beings, and getting it wrong costs the athletes the part of the session that had the most learning in it.

Syllabus focus. Inquiry question: How does training differ for individual and group sports? This lesson completes the dot point: Compare aspects that need to be considered when designing a training session for individual and group sports; covering the sub-points skill instruction and practice, conditioning, strategies and tactics, and athlete reflection and/or coach evaluation. Lesson 9 covered the first three sub-points.
01
Think first, your gut answer
warm-up

A coach plans ninety minutes. After the warm-up there are three blocks to fit in: teaching a new skill, a hard conditioning block, and a tactical session on defending a set play. They can be run in any order.

Write down the order you would use, then write the reason for the first decision you made. Then answer the harder part: what would you lose if you put the conditioning block first, and is that loss physiological, technical or both?

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02
What you'll master
intentions
  • Sequence skill instruction and practice, conditioning and strategies and tactics inside a session, and justify the order on physiological and learning grounds.
  • Choose a practice structure that suits the skill and the stage the learner is at.
  • Explain what conditioning contributes to a session and why its placement changes what it costs.
  • Distinguish athlete reflection from coach evaluation, and describe what each contributes that the other cannot.
  • Compare all four of these aspects between an individual sport and a group sport, and give the reason for each difference.
03
Key terms
vocabulary
  • Skill instruction — the coach's explanation, demonstration and correction of a movement pattern.
  • Practice — the structured repetition through which a skill is acquired and refined.
  • Massed practice — practice with little or no rest between attempts.
  • Distributed practice — practice with rest intervals between attempts or blocks.
  • Blocked practice — many repetitions of one skill before moving to the next.
  • Random practice — skills interleaved so that the learner must reselect the movement each time.
  • Conditioning — the physical preparation component of a session, developing the fitness the sport requires.
  • Strategy — the overall plan for how a contest will be approached.
  • Tactic — a specific action or adjustment used to carry out the strategy in a particular situation.
  • Modified game — a game with altered rules, space, numbers or equipment so that a target behaviour occurs more often.
  • Athlete reflection — the athlete's own judgement of what happened and why.
  • Coach evaluation — the coach's judgement of whether the session achieved its aim, and what the next session should therefore contain.
04
Skill instruction and practice, and why it goes early
core concept

Skill work belongs early in the session, after the warm-up and before heavy conditioning, and the reason is not tradition. Motor learning depends on the quality of the repetitions, and quality falls with fatigue. A fatigued athlete produces slower, less precise movement and receives less reliable feedback from it, so late-session skill practice can rehearse the compensations that fatigue produces rather than the technique the coach wants. There is a second reason: attention is a limited resource, and a new skill demands most of it.

The syllabus pairs instruction with practice, and the practice structure is a real decision. Two axes matter.

Choosing a practice structure, and what each is good for
StructureWhat it looks likeBest used whenCost
Massed Repetitions with little rest, high volume in a short block The skill is simple, the athlete is experienced, and the goal is to groove or maintain Fatigue accumulates and degrades the later repetitions, so quality has to be watched
Distributed Shorter practice blocks separated by rest or by another activity The skill is new, complex or demanding, or the athlete is a beginner Fewer repetitions in the same wall-clock time
Blocked All repetitions of one skill, then all of the next First acquisition, when the athlete needs to build a stable pattern Performance in the session looks better than the learning actually is
Random Skills interleaved, so each attempt requires a fresh selection Refinement, and any sport where the skill must be chosen under pressure Looks worse during the session, and athletes often dislike it

The blocked-versus-random contrast contains the single most useful idea in this card. Performance during a session is not the same as learning. Blocked practice produces better-looking repetitions on the day and poorer retention and transfer; random practice looks messier on the day and transfers better to the game. A coach who judges a session by how good the drill looked will systematically choose the weaker option.

Judge skill work by what the athlete can do next week under pressure, not by how the drill looked today. Those two measures disagree, and the one that matters is the second.

In your book. Copy the four-row table. Then write the sentence performance in a session is not learning and, under it, the one consequence: a drill that looks worse can be the better choice. Add one example from a sport you know.

Quick check: Skill instruction and practice is normally placed early in a session because:

05
Conditioning, and what its placement costs
core concept

Conditioning is the block that develops the fitness the sport demands, using the training types and methods of Lessons 3 to 5 and governed by the principles of Lessons 6 and 7. Inside a single session the interesting question is not which method, which Lesson 3 to 5 answered, but where the block sits and what that placement costs.

Three placements for the conditioning block, and the trade-off in each
PlacementWhat it buysWhat it costsWhen it is the right call
After the warm-up, before skill The conditioning is done fresh, so the highest quality and intensity are possible Skill and tactical work that follows is performed fatigued, and learns poorly When the conditioning target is maximal, for example maximal speed or maximal strength work
After skill and tactics Skill work gets the fresh athlete, which is where learning is protected Conditioning is done tired, so top-end quality is lower The default for most sessions, and for any session teaching something new
Integrated into the skill or game work High specificity: the athlete performs the skill in the fatigued state the game will impose Neither quality is fully controlled, and the load is harder to measure Later in a preparation phase, with a skill the athlete already owns

The third row is worth dwelling on, because it is where specificity from Lesson 6 shows its teeth. A netballer who can shoot beautifully when rested but not in the last quarter does not have a shooting problem or a fitness problem in isolation. Practising the skill under a controlled degree of fatigue is a legitimate and specific choice — but only once the technique is stable, or the session will simply rehearse a breakdown.

One more decision belongs here. In a group sport, conditioning is usually the block where the largest fitness differences inside the squad become visible. Running the same conditioning for eighteen athletes means it is too easy for some and beyond others, which breaches the individuality of the load in both directions. The usual solution is to hold the structure constant and vary the dose: same work-to-rest ratio, different distances, loads or repetition counts.

In your book. Draw the three placements as a vertical list. Beside each write the trade-off in one line. Then write the rule for group conditioning: hold the structure, vary the dose, with one worked example.

True or false: Placing a maximal-speed conditioning block immediately after the warm-up is a defensible choice, even though it means the skill work that follows is done fatigued.

06
Strategies and tactics inside the session
core concept

A strategy is the overall plan for how a contest will be approached; a tactic is a specific action used to carry it out in a given situation. A tennis player's strategy might be to attack the opponent's second serve; the tactic is stepping inside the baseline on a particular point. Lesson 13 examines what makes a strategy work. Here the question is narrower: how is tactical work built into a session?

Tactical understanding is trained by decisions, not by explanation. A coach can describe a defensive structure in two minutes, and the athletes will still not be able to execute it, because the difficulty was never in understanding the description. It is in recognising the cue under time pressure and choosing. So tactical blocks use modified games and constrained situations: change the space, the numbers, the scoring or the rules so that the decision the coach wants happens repeatedly and cannot be avoided.

Four constraints, and the behaviour each produces
Constraint appliedBehaviour it forcesTactical target
Reduce the playing areaFaster decisions, tighter control, more pressure on the receiverComposure and skill execution under pressure
Create an overload, four attackers against two defendersAttackers must find and use the extra playerRecognising and exploiting a numerical advantage
Award a point only for a scoring move that meets a conditionThe rewarded behaviour occurs far more often than in a free gameWhatever the condition names, for example switching the ball wide before scoring
Limit touches or time in possessionEarlier scanning and earlier decisionsSpeed of decision-making and support play

This is where the individual-to-group comparison is at its sharpest. In an individual sport, tactical work is largely anticipatory and self-directed: the athlete rehearses responses to an opponent's patterns, often against a coach, a machine or video, and must execute alone with no one to cover an error. In a group sport, tactical work is collective — it needs enough players to make the situation real, it depends on shared understanding and communication, and a single player's error can be absorbed or compounded by teammates. That is why a squad tactical block needs bodies and space, and an individual tactical block needs an opponent model.

The two words are not interchangeable

Marks are lost every year for using strategy and tactic as synonyms. Strategy is the plan for the contest; tactics are the moves that serve it. If a response says "the team's tactic was to play a possession game all match", it has described a strategy and called it a tactic. Fix it by asking: is this the whole approach, or one action inside it?

In your book. Write one strategy and three tactics that serve it, for one sport. Then write the four constraints as a column with the behaviour each forces. Finish with two lines: individual tactical work is anticipatory and self-directed, group tactical work is collective and needs shared understanding.

Fill the gaps. The overall plan for how a contest will be approached is a , while a specific action used to carry it out is a . Practice in which skills are interleaved so the learner must reselect the movement each time is called practice.

07
Athlete reflection and coach evaluation are two different things
core concept

The syllabus lists this sub-point as athlete reflection and/or coach evaluation, and the two are not the same activity done by different people. They answer different questions and they fail in different ways.

Reflection and evaluation, side by side
Athlete reflectionCoach evaluation
Question answeredWhat happened for me, why, and what will I do differently?Did the session achieve its aim, and what should the next session contain?
Evidence usedInternal: how the movement felt, effort, confidence, what the athlete noticedExternal: observation, session data, testing, whether the target behaviour occurred
What it uniquely providesInformation no observer has, and the ownership that makes an athlete self-correct without being toldComparison against the aim and across sessions, which an athlete inside the session cannot make
How it failsBecomes a ritual with no consequence, or is dominated by how the athlete feels about the resultJudges the session by whether it looked good or felt hard, rather than against the stated aim
Individual sportImmediate, detailed and continuous, because the athlete has the coach's full attentionMade against that athlete's own history, so small changes are meaningful
Group sportNeeds a deliberate structure, because a squad will not reflect in the gaps and quieter athletes will not volunteerNeeds both squad-level and individual evidence, because a squad average hides the athlete who improved most and the one who did nothing

Notice how the evaluation row depends on Lesson 9. A session with a vague aim cannot be evaluated at all — there is nothing to compare the evidence against — so the coach falls back on whether the session looked busy. That is the practical reason the aim has to be goal specific, and it is the link that turns these two lessons into one argument.

Evaluation is a comparison against the aim. If the aim was not specific enough to compare against, the evaluation is just an opinion about how the session felt.

In your book. Two columns, reflection and evaluation. Fill the question answered, the evidence used and the failure mode for each. Then write the link sentence: a vague aim makes evaluation impossible, and put an arrow back to your Lesson 9 page.

Two truths and a lie. One of these statements is false. Find it.

08
Assembling the whole session, and the comparison the dot point wants
synthesis

Put Lessons 9 and 10 together and a session has a defensible default order: aim, safety check, warm-up, skill, tactics, conditioning, cool-down, reflection and evaluation. The order is not a rule to recite. It is the consequence of two facts — quality falls with fatigue, and attention is limited — so any departure from it has to be justified by something that outweighs those facts, as maximal speed work does.

Now the comparison. Every difference between the individual and group versions of this session still traces to the three causes from Lesson 9: many needs rather than one, divided attention, and a shared clock and space. Applied to this lesson's four sub-points, they produce the following.

The four sub-points of this lesson, compared
AspectIndividual sportGroup sportCause of the difference
Skill instruction and practice Continuous individual feedback, corrections within the same repetition, practice structure chosen for one learner's stage Instruction given once to all, feedback sampled, structure chosen for the majority with stations or peer feedback filling the gap Divided attention, plus many stages of learning in one squad
Conditioning Dose set precisely from that athlete's testing data Structure held constant, dose varied by group, so one work-to-rest ratio serves a wide fitness range Many needs, not one
Strategies and tactics Anticipatory and self-directed, rehearsed against an opponent model, executed with no one to cover an error Collective, needs enough players and space to be real, depends on shared understanding and communication The nature of the contest, plus shared space
Reflection and evaluation Immediate and continuous, against the athlete's own history Deliberately structured, at squad and individual level, usually in the cool-down because it is the only reliable whole-squad moment Divided attention and a shared clock

And, as in Lesson 9, say what does not differ: the order of the blocks and the reasons for it, the relationship between fatigue and skill learning, the difference between performance and learning, and the requirement that evaluation be made against the aim. Those hold for one athlete and for eighteen.

In your book. Add these four rows to the comparison table you started in Lesson 9, so you have one page covering all seven sub-points. Star every row where the two settings match. That single page is the answer to any compare question this dot point can ask.

Odd one out. Three of these are genuine individual-to-group differences in session design. Which one is the same in both settings?

The default order, and what justifies it Warm-up Lesson 9 Skill freshest attention Tactics decisions, not talk Conditioning cost paid last Cool-down and feedback Evaluate against the aim Two facts generate this order: movement quality falls with fatigue, and attention is limited. Departing from it needs a reason that outweighs both — maximal speed or maximal strength work is the usual one. Performance in the session is not learning Blocked practice all of one skill, then the next looks better on the day retains and transfers worse right for first acquisition Random practice skills interleaved, reselected each time looks worse on the day retains and transfers better right for refinement under pressure A coach who judges the session by how the drill looked will pick the weaker option every time. This is why the evaluation has to be made against the aim, not against the appearance of the session.
Above, the default order of a session with the justification for each placement. Below, the contrast that makes skill practice a real decision: the two measures disagree, and the one a coach can see during the session is the wrong one.
09
Activity 1 · Choose the practice structure
activity

For each situation, choose massed or distributed, and blocked or random. Give the reason, and name what you are trading away.

1

A 14-year-old is learning the overhead serve for the first time.

2

An experienced midfielder can pass accurately in drills but repeatedly picks the wrong pass in matches.

3

A sprinter is maintaining an already stable starting technique two weeks out from a championship.

4

A squad of eighteen contains four beginners and fourteen experienced players, and the session must teach one new defensive skill to all of them.

Match each term to its meaning.

  • Distributed practice
  • Random practice
  • Modified game
  • Coach evaluation
  • Practice broken into shorter blocks separated by rest or another activity
  • Practice in which skills are interleaved so each attempt requires a fresh selection
  • A game with altered rules, space, numbers or equipment so a target behaviour occurs more often
  • A judgement of whether the session achieved its aim, and of what the next session should contain
10
Activity 2 · Diagnose the session plan
activity

Here is a real-looking ninety-minute plan for a squad of sixteen hockey players, three days before a match.

Session plan as written
TimeBlockDetail as written
0–8 minWarm-upTwo laps, then held stretches, then straight into the first drill
8–33 minConditioningSix sets of 400 m at near maximum, three minutes between sets, whole squad together
33–58 minSkillNew reverse-stick trap, taught to all sixteen at once, forty repetitions each
58–85 minTacticsCoach explains the new pressing structure on a whiteboard, then a full-field game with no conditions
85–90 minFinishPlayers collect equipment and leave
AimWritten on the plan"Sharpen up before Saturday"

Identify five problems. For each one, name the aspect it belongs to, explain why it is a problem, and give the change you would make. Then answer two further questions: which single change would improve the session most, and what makes the aim as written impossible to evaluate?

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Lock it in. In one sentence, explain why a drill that looks worse during the session can be the better choice for the athlete's performance next Saturday.

Compare6 marks

Compare how skill instruction, conditioning and tactical work are sequenced within a training session for an individual and a group sport.

1
Unpack the verb

Compare requires similarities and differences on shared criteria. The subject here is sequencing, so the comparison is about order and timing, not content.

Plan: set the criteria, run both contexts against each, then draw out what the comparison means.

Keep the answer on sequencing. Drifting into what each component contains is the commonest way to lose focus on this stem.
Explain5 marks

Explain the role of athlete reflection and coach evaluation at the end of a training session.

1
Unpack the verb

Explain asks what these practices do and how. Saying they are important without a mechanism does not answer the question.

Plan: name the principle, build linked pairs for each function, then answer the question directly.

Two practices are named in the stem. Give each its own mechanism, and say how they differ, or the answer will blur them together.
11
Revisit your thinking
reflection

Go back to card 01. The defensible default is skill, then tactics, then conditioning, because movement quality and attention both fall with fatigue and skill learning depends on both. Putting conditioning first costs you the quality of the skill and tactical work that follows, which is a learning loss rather than a physiological one — the conditioning itself is fine, and is in fact better done fresh. So the question is not which block is more important but which loss you are willing to accept, and for a session teaching something new the answer is clear. Write down whether your original order survives that reasoning, and what would have to be true about the session for you to justify putting conditioning first.

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01
Multiple choice
1 mark each

MC 1. Random practice usually produces better retention and transfer than blocked practice, even though:

  • A. it requires far more total repetitions to be effective
  • B. performance during the practice session itself often looks worse
  • C. it can only be used with beginners
  • D. it removes the need for coach feedback

MC 2. A coach places a maximal-speed block immediately after the warm-up, before any skill work. The best justification is that:

  • A. skill work is unaffected by fatigue
  • B. speed work serves as an extension of the warm-up
  • C. maximal-quality efforts require a fresh athlete, so the cost is deliberately paid by the later blocks
  • D. conditioning must always precede skill in any session

MC 3. Which of these is a tactic rather than a strategy?

  • A. Building the whole match plan around keeping possession and limiting turnovers
  • B. Preparing for the season by prioritising defensive structure over attacking variety
  • C. Approaching every contest by playing at high tempo from the first minute
  • D. Moving the fullback into the front line for a single attacking play late in the game

MC 4. A coach halves the size of the playing area in a small-sided game. The most likely tactical purpose is to:

  • A. force faster decisions and rehearse skill execution under pressure
  • B. reduce the physiological demand on the players
  • C. make blocked practice possible within a game
  • D. allow the coach to observe all players without moving

MC 5. Athlete reflection contributes something coach evaluation cannot, namely:

  • A. a comparison of this session against previous sessions
  • B. an objective record of whether the target behaviour occurred
  • C. internal information about how the movement felt, which no observer has access to
  • D. a judgement of whether the session achieved its stated aim
02
Short answer questions
extended response

SA 1. Understand Band 4 Explain why skill instruction and practice are normally placed before the conditioning block in a training session, and describe one situation in which a coach would justifiably reverse that order. (4 marks)

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SA 2. Apply Band 5 Describe how a coach could use a modified game to develop a specific tactical behaviour, and explain why this is more effective than explaining the same behaviour to the athletes. (5 marks)

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SA 3. Evaluate Band 6 Compare how skill practice, conditioning and evaluation are handled when designing a training session for an individual sport and for a group sport. Justify each difference you identify. (7 marks)

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📖 Comprehensive answers (click to reveal)

Multiple choice: 1 → B. 2 → C. 3 → D. 4 → A. 5 → C.

Activity 1, indicative answers: 1 → Distributed and blocked. The skill is new and the learner is a beginner, so repetitions must stay high in quality and a stable pattern has to form before variation is added. Trade-off: fewer repetitions in the same time, and session performance that flatters the actual learning. 2 → Random, and distributed enough to keep decision quality high. The problem is not execution but selection under pressure, and only interleaved practice trains selection. Trade-off: the drill will look worse and the player may resist it, so the coach has to explain why. 3 → Massed and blocked. The technique is stable, the goal is maintenance rather than acquisition, and grooving is exactly what massed blocked practice does well. Trade-off: little transfer benefit, which does not matter here because there is nothing new to transfer. 4 → Blocked and distributed for the four beginners, moving to random for the fourteen experienced players once the pattern is stable. Handle the split with stations or with the same drill at two levels of variation, so the structure is common and the difficulty differs — the same "hold the structure, vary the dose" rule used for conditioning.

Activity 2, indicative answers: Five problems, from many available. The warm-up is too short, and it ends with held static stretches immediately before hard running, which can briefly reduce force and power; replace with a general raise followed by progressive sport-specific movement. The conditioning is placed before skill and tactics, so both later blocks are performed fatigued and a brand-new skill is being taught to tired athletes; move conditioning after the skill and tactical work. Six near-maximal 400 m efforts three days before a match is excessive load with no recovery margin; reduce volume and intensity given the fixture. The conditioning is run for the whole squad together at one dose, so it is too easy for some and beyond others; hold the work-to-rest structure and vary the distance or repetitions by group. The tactical block is delivered as a whiteboard explanation followed by an unconstrained game, which trains no decision; replace with a modified game whose conditions force the pressing behaviour to occur. There is no cool-down and no reflection or evaluation, so the session ends with equipment collection; add a graded cool-down carrying the squad feedback. The single most valuable change is moving conditioning after skill and tactics, because it improves the two blocks with the greatest learning content at no physiological cost. The aim cannot be evaluated because "sharpen up before Saturday" names no outcome and no measure, so there is nothing for the evidence to be compared against and the coach can only judge whether the session looked busy.

SA 1 (4 marks): Two reasons, each explained. Fatigue [1]: motor learning depends on the quality of repetitions, and a fatigued athlete moves more slowly and less precisely, so practice late in a session can rehearse fatigue compensations rather than the intended technique [1]. Attention [1]: attention is limited and a new or complex skill demands most of it, so a tired athlete has less available for the corrections the coach is giving. A justified reversal [1]: maximal-speed or maximal-strength conditioning requires a fresh athlete to reach the intended quality, so a coach may deliberately place it first and accept the reduced quality of the skill work that follows — a defensible trade when the session's aim is that maximal quality and the skill content is already stable.

SA 2 (5 marks): Name a tactical target [1], for example switching the ball wide before attacking. Describe the constraint [2]: modify the game so a goal only counts if the ball has crossed a defined channel first, or create a four-against-two overload, or reduce the area, or limit touches — the answer must name the modification and say what behaviour it forces, not just that a game was modified. Explain the advantage [2]: tactical difficulty lies in recognising the cue and choosing under time pressure, not in understanding a description, so an explanation transfers poorly [1]; a constraint makes the target decision occur repeatedly and unavoidably in a realistic context, so the athlete practises the recognition and selection rather than the vocabulary [1]. Credit is also available for noting that the constraint gives the coach an observable measure of whether the behaviour is occurring, which the explanation does not.

SA 3 (7 marks): A comparison with a stated basis, both settings, and a reason for each difference. Skill practice [2]: an individual athlete receives continuous feedback and the practice structure can be matched to one learner's stage; in a squad, instruction is given once, feedback is sampled, and the structure serves the majority with stations or peer feedback filling the gap — the cause is the coach's divided attention combined with many stages of learning present at once. Conditioning [2]: individual dose is set precisely from that athlete's testing data; group conditioning holds the structure constant and varies the dose, because one work-to-rest ratio must serve a wide fitness range and running one dose for eighteen is simultaneously too easy and too hard. Evaluation [2]: individual evaluation is immediate, continuous and made against that athlete's own history; group evaluation needs deliberate structure and both squad-level and individual evidence, because a squad average hides both the athlete who improved most and the one who did not train, and because a squad will not reflect unless the session makes time for it. What does not differ [1]: the reasons for the block order, the relationship between fatigue and skill learning, the distinction between performance and learning, and the requirement that evaluation be a comparison against a goal-specific aim. A top-band response also notes that a difference which would disappear if singles tennis were compared with doubles tennis is a sport-specific difference rather than an individual-to-group one.

01
Consolidate what you have just learned
review

Lessons 9 and 10 together cover all seven sub-points of one dot point, and they are best revised as one page rather than two. The comparison table now has seven rows: aim, health and safety, warm-up and cool-down, skill instruction and practice, conditioning, strategies and tactics, and reflection and evaluation.

Two ideas from this lesson will keep returning. Performance in a session is not learning, which reappears whenever a coach has to judge whether something is working. And evaluation is a comparison against the aim, which is the hinge between these two lessons and the yearly program in Lesson 11, where the same logic operates over months instead of minutes.

Mark lesson as complete

Tick when you've finished the practice and review.