Key Takeaways

  • Plan for 6 to 8 weeks of pre-season before your first competitive game, longer if you’ve done nothing since the season ended.
  • In other field sports, players who completed more pre-season picked up fewer injuries and played more games. The Gaelic football data points the same way, though it’s smaller and less certain.
  • GAA injuries spike when the games start, not in pre-season. So the aim of pre-season is to be ready for the league, and to keep training once it begins.
  • Gaelic footballers who hit top speed in training had far lower odds of injury. Speed belongs in pre-season from week one.
  • The biggest risk is doing too much too soon. Big week-to-week jumps in load raised injury risk, especially for younger players.

Most pre-season plans you’ll find online are a PDF of running sessions, and the one ranking top in Ireland dates from 2013. Running is part of it. But pre-season is also where you build the speed and strength that carry you through the league, and where a lot of players set themselves up for a hamstring in February.

We’ll cover five things:

  1. How long pre-season should be
  2. What the research says pre-season does for you
  3. The four things every pre-season needs
  4. How to lay out the 8 weeks
  5. Fitting it around team training

How Long Should Pre-Season Be?

Around 6 to 8 weeks is the usual recommendation for Gaelic games (Duggan et al., 2023). The GAA and GPA’s own policy for county teams builds in a 6-week training block before pre-season competitions start.

The simplest way to plan it: find your first competitive game and count back 8 weeks.

  • Club players are usually back in January, with leagues starting around March.
  • County players can return from 20 November 2026 for the 2027 season, with the National League proposed for the weekend of 23 January.

If you’ve trained through the off-season, 6 weeks is plenty. If you’ve done nothing since your last game, give yourself longer. Fitness drops faster than strength when you stop (Mujika and Padilla, 2000). In soccer players, two weeks off was enough to lose measurable intermittent running and repeated-sprint performance (Joo, 2018). Over a 10-week off-season, academy rugby players lost jump height and sprint speed (Twist et al., 2022). None of that is a disaster. It just means the first weeks are about getting back to where you were, not pushing on.

What Pre-Season Does for You

The case for a proper pre-season comes mostly from other football codes, where the data is bigger:

  • In rugby league, every 10 extra pre-season sessions a player completed went with 17% lower odds of injury in-season (Windt et al., 2017).
  • In Australian football, players who completed over 85% of pre-season went on to play 76.7% of matches. Those who completed less than half played 52.7% (Murray et al., 2017).
  • In elite soccer, more pre-season sessions went with less time lost to injury, though pre-season explained only a small part of the difference (Ekstrand et al., 2020).

In Gaelic football, players who completed more than half of pre-season had fewer non-contact injuries, 14.9 against 24.5 per 1,000 hours, but the study was too small for that difference to be certain (Fisher et al., 2022). It points the same way. It doesn’t prove it on its own.

When GAA injuries actually happen

Eight years of GAA injury surveillance found the injuries cluster in the National League, not pre-season. The typical county team picked up 4 injuries in pre-season and 20 in the league phase (Roe et al., 2018). Those are counts, not rates, and they come from before the split season, but the pattern is clear.

The authors also noted that pre-season work offered little protection against those early-season exposures on its own. That’s the part most plans miss. Pre-season gets you ready for the league. It doesn’t cover you for the whole of it. The speed and strength work carries on once the games start, in smaller doses.

Speed protects, spikes hurt

Two findings from Gaelic games stand out:

  • Hitting top speed in training. Gaelic footballers who reached over 95% of their max velocity in training had far lower odds of injury than those who only got to 85% (Malone et al., 2017a). Too little and too much top-speed running both raised risk. The sweet spot was regular, controlled exposure.
  • Load spikes. Big jumps in training load from one week to the next raised injury risk, and players in their first year were hit hardest (Malone et al., 2017b). Poorer running fitness raised it too.

In hurling, slower players over 5, 10 and 20 m carried roughly three times the injury risk, and moderate weekly training loads were protective in pre-season (Malone et al., 2019).

Put together: build speed early, build load gradually, and don’t try to win pre-season in the first fortnight.

The Four Things Every Pre-Season Needs

1. A running base, built gradually

Early on, the running is about getting your engine back: longer, steadier efforts, and off-feet work on a bike or rower if your legs need a break from the ground. Closer to games, it shifts to repeat sprints: short hard efforts with incomplete rest, which is what a match asks of you.

We want the weekly running to climb steadily. We don’t want a big jump in week one because the team’s first night back was a hard one. That’s the spike the research warns about. Once collective training starts, the team supplies most of your running and your own sessions move towards speed and strength.

For more on the repeat-sprint side, see our repeat sprint ability guide.

2. Speed, from week one

Speed isn’t something to add in week 7. Short accelerations over 10 to 20 m, fully recovered, go in from the first week. As the weeks go on, add longer build-ups where you get close to top speed. By the end of pre-season you should have run at or near your max a good few times before a game asks you to.

Speed work goes first in the session, while you’re fresh. Short-rest sprints are conditioning, not speed, so we keep the two apart. More on this in our speed training guide.

3. Strength in the gym

Two gym sessions a week is enough for most players. Early in pre-season the lifting is about volume and learning positions. Later it gets heavier, with less of it, and more jumping and fast lifting. Squat or trap-bar deadlift, single-leg work, and hamstring work at length like Nordics are the backbone.

Our strength training guide covers the gym side in detail.

4. Landing, braking and hamstrings

Matches are full of hard stops, cuts and landings, and the hamstring is the headline GAA injury (Roe et al., 2017). So pre-season covers landing well, braking under control and hamstrings at length, most weeks. For female players this matters more again, given the higher ACL risk. Our camogie strength training guide goes into that.

Laying Out the 8 Weeks

Two 4-week blocks. Each block builds for three weeks and eases off in the fourth, so the work has time to land.

  • Weeks 1 to 3, build. Steady running and off-feet work, climbing gradually. Short accelerations over 10 to 20 m. In the gym, more sets at moderate weights while you learn the lifts.
  • Week 4, ease off. Less of everything. Keep a few sprints in.
  • Weeks 5 to 7, sharpen. Repeat sprints closer to match efforts. Longer build-ups to near top speed. Heavier lifting, fewer reps, more jumps.
  • Week 8, ready. Low volume. A few quality sprints and a short, fast gym session.

This is the shape, not a prescription. A player coming back from a hamstring, a player who trained right through the winter and a 17-year-old in their first proper pre-season will each fill it differently.

Fitting It Around Team Training

Before the team is back, you have the week to yourself: two gym sessions plus two or three running or speed sessions works well.

Once collective training starts, the team takes over most of the running. County teams can hold up to four collective sessions a week under the GAA and GPA’s policy, and clubs vary. Your own work drops to two gym sessions, with speed at the start of each. A few rules of thumb:

  • Keep the hardest gym session three or more days before a game or challenge match.
  • Keep the day before and the day after a game gym-free.
  • If the team does a heavy running night, don’t stack your own conditioning on top of it.

Some weeks it won’t line up, with a challenge match midweek or a double session. That’s normal. Move the short session, keep the main one.

And don’t skip the warm-up. The GAA’s own guidelines recommend the GAA 15 before all training and matches. Our RAMP warm-up guide covers how to structure one.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should GAA pre-season training last? 6 to 8 weeks before your first competitive game. Longer if you’ve done nothing since the season ended.

I’ve done nothing all off-season. Where do I start? With 2 to 4 easier weeks before the main 8. Get the running and lifting going at a level you can repeat, then build. Jumping straight into full sessions is the spike the research links to injury, and first-year and younger players were most at risk (Malone et al., 2017b).

Should I focus on running or the gym in pre-season? Both, with speed in the middle of it. Before the team is back, you’re doing your own running. Once collective training starts, the team does most of that and your time goes into speed and strength.

Is pre-season different for hurling or camogie? The shape is the same. The detail changes: hurling rewards short-range speed, and slower hurlers carried more injury risk (Malone et al., 2019). For camogie and ladies football, landing and knee work get extra attention.

When does county pre-season start? For the 2027 season, county teams can return to collective training from 20 November 2026, with the National League proposed to start on the weekend of 23 January 2027.

Want a Pre-Season Built for You?

If you’d rather follow a plan than build one, the Pre-Season Pack is 12 weeks for December to February: 3 sessions a week, 45 to 50 minutes, sprint and jump work first, then strength. It runs in the OHP app on your phone.

If you’d rather have it written around your position, your injuries and your club’s schedule, that’s what Custom Programming does.

References

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  6. Malone S, Roe M, Doran DA, Gabbett TJ, Collins K (2017b). Aerobic fitness and playing experience protect against spikes in workload: the role of the acute:chronic workload ratio on injury risk in elite Gaelic football. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2017. PMID 27400233.
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  12. Twist C, et al. 2022. PMID 35862157.
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