Kevin Mulcahy, TMC Performance Coaching

“Post-Season: Smart Reset Not Full Shutdown”

Four to six weeks of doing nothing is not recovery. It’s detraining with extra steps.

The post-season is a transition phase — not a blank page. Every player needs different things from it, and doing the wrong thing in those first four weeks costs you weeks of development come January in summer sports or July in Winter sports.

Sprint profiles: get the aerobic stimulus back in by week 3. Not hard — just consistent.

Hybrid profiles: review your GPS drift from the season before you design anything.

Aerobic profiles: early speed stimulus. Weeks 3–4. Before the aerobic engine fully resets.

Two weeks of genuine rest, yes. But after that? The next season has already started.

“Availability Is Your Best Tactic”

Hägglund and colleagues followed professional football teams across a full 30-week season.

Their finding was blunt: the single strongest predictor of team success wasn’t tactics, wasn’t budget, wasn’t squad depth.

It was availability.

The team with the most players available for selection — consistently, across the whole season — won the most games.

Profile-matched training is how you get there.

Coach the person standing in front of you, not the normative data or “averages” pulled from who knows where?

The right load on the right player at the right time.

No accumulation for athletes who can’t tolerate it.

No under-stimulus for athletes who need more.

Every player arriving to training ready to go hard.

Keep them on the field. That’s the tactic.

I’ll be honest — I never fully trusted skill tests.

Too easy to reduce a player to a score and miss what’s actually going on.

But as part of my MSc in Skill Acquisition in Sport, I had to build one. So I built a Bilateral Shooting Index for Gaelic Football — moving, progressing, eventually fully opposed. Coordination → Adaptability → Performance.

And what came back surprised me.

Not the data. The stories inside the data.

A player who tests well technically but won’t commit off their weak side in a game — that’s not a skill gap, that’s a confidence gap. Completely different fix.
Two clubs three miles apart, same county, same standard.

One BSI 52, one BSI 31. Nobody had mapped it before. The coaching fingerprint is on every single player.

I built a non-linear practice design framework around the results — drawing on the PoST research of and , and the bilateral GAA work of .

Dial up or down based on where each player actually is. Not where you wish they were.

If you want to bring this to your club — one-off workshop, 1-2-1 coach mentoring, or a full season partnership to track and develop skill from U14 up — send me a message or check the link in bio.

“Pre-Season: Build for the Player, Not the Team”

Pre-season is where most squads either arrive at round one prepared — or they arrive and hope nobody pulls a hamstring in week 3.

The difference is this: were your sessions built for your squad, or for a generic fitness programme you found online?

MAS-percentage intensity prescription means every player is working at the right effort level — not too easy, not overreached.

Whether their MAS is 11 km/h or 16 km/h, the prescription is accurate.

That’s how you get a full squad to round one.

That’s how you prevent the pre-season injury epidemic.

That’s how you stop dreading the first physio report of the year.

Profile → prescribe → perform. In that order. Every time.

&CCoach

Off-Season: Build What Your Body Lacks”

The off-season is the most important training phase of the year — and the one most players waste.

This is your window.
Six to twelve weeks of zero game congestion.
No recovery debt from last weekend.
No preparation needed for next weekend. Just targeted work on the exact quality each player lacks.

Sprint profile → aerobic base. Full stop.

Aerobic profile → speed ceiling. Heavy posterior chain. Plyometric exposure.

Hybrid profile → pick the weaker domain. Chase it hard.

One rule: don’t train the strength. Train the gap.

Coaches profile your squad before the off-season starts.

Build the programme around what the data tells you — not what feels like hard work.

“Hybrid Profile — SRR (Speed reserve ratio) 1.71–1.90”

The most common player on your squad. And the one most coaches accidentally leave behind.

Hybrid players are competent in both domains — decent speed, decent engine. Which means with generic training, they stay decent. Average in everything. Untapped in both directions.

The key with a Hybrid player is this: pick a direction each season and chase it. Don’t split the difference every year and wonder why they never break through.

Off-season → identify their weaker domain from GPS and testing. Build that first.
Pre-season → integrate both qualities. Game-realistic patterns.
In-season → monitor both. Retest at mid-season. Don’t let them drift.

Your linking midfielders, your utility players, your attacking full backs, half backs, midfielders etc. They have more in them. Give them a plan that proves it.


&C

“Sprint Profile — SRR >1.90”

Fast, explosive, dominant in the first 30 metres. And absolutely dying in the last 10 minutes of the game.
Sound familiar?

That’s your Sprint Profile player. Massive speed ceiling, thin aerobic base.

They’ll win you moments — but if you don’t build their engine in the off-season, they’ll cost you games in the final quarter.

Off-season priority: aerobic base. Not sprints. Not intervals. Base.

In-season priority: volume management and posterior chain — every single week without exception.

Your target forwards, your pressing midfielders, your defensive backs. Profile them. Train the weakness. Keep them on the field.

“One-Size Training Is Breaking Your Squad”

Here’s an uncomfortable truth.

If you’re running the same conditioning session for every player on your panel — the same reps, the same distances, the same intensity — you’re not just leaving performance on the table. You’re building injuries.
Your sprint athlete doesn’t need more aerobic volume.

They need a base.

Your aerobic athlete doesn’t need more long runs. They need a speed ceiling.

Your hybrid player doesn’t need more of the same.

They need a direction.

The research backs it up. The GPS data backs it up. And if you look hard enough, your physio’s injury list backs it up too.

There’s a better way. And it starts with knowing who you’re actually training.