Does Erik ten Hag's game model improve physicality?
Most blog posts start with a dictionary snippet. So does this one.
Physicality contains a handful of realms. There is speed, power, strength, endurance, and agility. Each domain contributes to the human capability to play sports.
The question posed in the title refers to speed, strength and endurance. If you’re looking for a short-snap answer to post on social media; the short answer to the question is no. If you’re interested in a nuanced explanation as to why; keep scrolling.
Exercise (e.g. playing a game of football) trains speed, strength and endurance. The question is whether the return is significant and whether a style of play is a method to train it.
The human body is blessed with multiple energy-delivering systems which allow us to sprint, sprint repeatedly, but also walk, jog or run for long distances. Football is a sport which requires its players to be proficient in all of those instances - meaning every energy system needs to be trained.
For example; a player’s ability to sprint at maximum speed is trained by multiple repetitions of sprinting - with long rests in between to restore energy-producers.
A player’s ability to sprint at maximum speed repeatedly is in turn trained through maximal speed repetitions, but with rest times shorter than the human body requires to restore ATP. This trains the shortening of recovering between high-intensity actions.
PERIODISATION is the area where staff scale the process of training each athlete on multiple levels - the macrocycle (one season half) - the mesocycle (4-6 weeks) - microcycle (1 week). They differ in volume and intensity through modalities: distances, repetitions, rest time, et cetera.
This part is vital to train an athlete most optimally - meaning they achieve their potential fitness status and maintain it throughout a season, and avoid injuries.
When the goal is to improve a player’s capacity to repeat maximal sprint speeds, the process behind it can lead to different outcomes. The first process might be to shorten recovery times, and detail a mesocycle in which the player has to hit x-amount of repetitions on x-days per week, with x-amount of recovery in between. This is the periodisation. Correct periodisation leads to the optimal fitness status of a player.
Another process might consist of the player not doing it through a periodized programme in training. The player does, however, complete repeated sprints in Saturday’s game. In the game, staff cannot control the modalities - the player’s sprints could be 10 metres or 40 metres, with 10 seconds rest or 2 minutes rest in between. This process does not train an athlete in any optimal way, and does not improve “physicality” or “physical flooring”.
The exercise law all above follows is the law of specificity; training must be specific to what you want to train.
However, playing a game of football does train the body. Not in a controllable or meaningful way, though.
Another exercise/training law is the law of the diminishing/reduced returns.
This law states that, with increasing physical output - say the start of training in July towards the state of fitness come November - the gains in fitness status diminishes.
For our example, this means that the first games played by unfit players will “improve their physical floor” - but that diminishes over their training status. In order to maintain that training or fitness level, they need a periodized programme. Which is not possible through games.
The answer
Playing football games does not improve the physicality - training in a periodized programme does. The latter is what Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United do (and any football team in the world). The former is fan fiction.
“Repeated pressures” as a physical outcome of a game model is exactly that: an outcome. It is unscientific to suggest it is a means to achieve another goal. Teams that wish to play high-pressing football, use periodized training to train players towards that status. They don’t train it in the game itself.