Marginal gains is something I found Olympic athletes use to further improvement.
These athletes are literally in the top 1% of their sport so every teeny tiny bit of improvement counts.
In the 100m sprint, the times between first, second and third were 9.92, 9.94 and 9.95secs - if the third place getter was just .3 of sec faster then he would have won.
In athlete terms this can be the difference between gaining enough sponsorship to be able to dedicate full time to training or only being able to dedicate to training.
Getting back to marginal gains, it refers to improving .5 - 1% in 5 - 10 different area's that all contribute in some way, shape or form, to your performance.
If everything goes well then you could have a 5 - 10% improvement in your performance 'markers' and surely some improvement to your actual performance.
The points that follows are probably all in the marginal gains bag as they aren't the biog rocks of footy training that we have been covering, but improvement in them will result in greater on-field success.
POINTS BOARD - keep data of who trains and then improves upon whatever data you decide to collect. Players might get 1 point for training, 3 points for an extra session (must provide proof) and 5 points for improving upon a time trial, skill or speed drill score. Put it all up on your special media so people see it because who doesn't want to be announced a winner in front of the world on Facebook?
BODY COMPOSITION - at local/amateur level body composition can have a huge impact on how you go. If you're a tad over wight then the stress going through your body might be more then it's ready to handle and what happens next - snap or tear. If you've got players who you believe have high potential but they're excess is holding them back in regards to endurance, speed, change of direction and/or injury then as a coach I wouldn't hesitate to have a 1-on-1 and ask them to try and drop a few kgs. Aim for 2 - 3kgs at first which can be done in 2 - 3 weeks easily - nothing major. If you're really serous about this then a simple weight in at various times of the year is pretty simple to do. Be sure that you have a solution in how to do this though - don't ask players to do something you can't tell them how to do (but I can wink, wink...)
ERADICATE FUMBLING - how many times would you have been away into an open goal if someone didn't just make a tiny fumble up field? Too many times to count in local/amateur footy that's for sure. On way around this is to purposefully train for it so instead of actually trying to hit someone on the chest with a kick, purposefully kick a mongrel, the type you see 100's of times in a game as you can't just roll up to a game and pick every ball up cleanly if you've been getting nice easy kicks on the chest at training all year. Get specific!
GROUP PLAYERS FOR FITNESS - with 60 - 80 players per team, a 1 size fits all training approach sense from a laziness point of view, but only a small 5 of your players will actually get trained optimally, making most drills close to useless for most players. By taking data such as time trial results for each player, then you can see your good, medium and bad runners and then you're able to group them up and train them to ACTUALLY IMPROVE. Let's say you're doing 5 x 200m with 60secs rest. Say the good runners finish each set in 35secs where the bad runners finish in 50secs. Now depending on where you start the rest period from, the good runners are getting MORE rest then the bad runners but this makes no sense for the bad runner who actually becomes an even worse runner because he done 1 decent 200m set (set #1) and the other 4 were pointless from a fatigue point of view. Getting back to the points board you might get 10 points for moving up a running group so it can also be used as a motivational tool. Grouping players is really a must when you think about it.
THE FIRST SESSION IS FIRST - You've got players who were there from night 1 but you get to Jan and then there's players just coming for their 1st night of pr-season so what should they do? The same first night as everyone else. Players need to know that if they start training late, then they'll be behind everyone else. For example where the initial players have already performed a decent amount of acceleration work prior to Xmas and are now ready for max velocity, this new batch of players will need to work through acceleration first. Same with aerobic capacity work - they'll need to do the long boring stuff before any more-intensive work as you need to build into these things, not go from the couch to 100.
OPPOSITE KICK/HANDBALL - a pet peeve of mine for 2 reasons. 1 - I'm a lefty and we are widely regarded as 1 sided but I kick on my right foot 10 x more often than right footers I play with or against so stick that and, 2 as a 5'6" full forward I cannot count the amount of times I had a 1-on-1 but in the time it takes my teammate to try and runaround a player to get a kick, or nit even get the kick away, is frustrating as hell. If they could have just chucked the ball on their opposite boot and tumbled the ball towards me, then we still have a decent chance of getting a result. If they spend 5secs trying to get onto their god side, or even worse get tackled while doing so, then we get nothing. Coaches expect players to be able to do this but rarely train it - lift!
PRE-SEASON MONDAY IS THE A SESSION - On the Monday your players should be at their freshest with coming off th weekend, only 1 day at work and 5 days since the last team training session. I would use this day for the most demanding training stuff you want them to do so the most physical and mental strength can go into them to facilitate greater learning and adaptation. You cannot learn when you're tired.
TRAIN POSITION SPECIFIC - at the local/amateur level we don't really swing our players from end to end too much like the AFL do these days and most players play the same position, or a similar set of positions every game which means they need a specific set of fitness. I'll post about this soon but look at the positions on the field, see how the players actually move in those positions during a game and train them accordingly. This also might mean you have a different battery of tests or performance indicators that these players require.