The training camp that trains the mind: what Deportivo Riestra's preseason camp teaches us about the psychology of preseason training

Every January and June, Deportivo Riestra relocates to Pinamar for a preseason camp that has become legendary in Argentina: wake-up at 3:15am, four training sessions a day, curfew at 9:30pm. Sport psychology explains why such an extreme training camp can build cohesion and mental toughness — and where the line falls with overtraining syndrome.

Author Virginia Marino

01 — 3:15AM IN PINAMAR

The training camp that became a case study

There's an alarm clock, in Argentina, that goes off well before dawn. It belongs to Deportivo Riestra, the club from Bajo Flores/Nueva Pompeya that reached Primera División for the first time in 2024 and has since become an informal case study for anyone working in sports preparation. Every January and June, the team relocates to Pinamar, on the Atlantic coast, for a preseason camp that has entered Argentine popular imagination for its harshness: wake-up at 3:15am, an energy drink, a first training session on the beach at 3:30am, a second session in the gym after a short rest, a third session mid-morning, a fourth in the late afternoon. The day ends with a curfew from 9:30 to 11pm, because within a few hours it all starts again.

Local reports have documented more than one instance of players collapsing from exhaustion on the sand dunes of Pinamar during the night sessions, in an almost surreal contrast with the music from the beachside nightlife venues just metres away. The routine has survived more than one change of coach — from the 2024 Primera División debut under Matías Módolo, through Cristian “el Ogro” Fabbiani, up to the most recent camps led by Gustavo “Tata” Benítez — a sign that the identity built around this regime belongs to the club even more than to any single coach, and boils down to the principle that discipline matters more than individual talent. That's no small detail: for a team without big names, raised in the working-class neighbourhood of Pompeya, the gruelling camp becomes an identity narrative as much as a training programme.

02 — A METHOD, NOT AN EXCEPTION

From Zeman to Bielsa, from Simeone to altitude camps

Riestra makes headlines because it takes to the extreme a logic that, in different forms, runs through the history of football and elite sport. A few examples help place the Argentine case in a wider picture:

Zdeněk Zeman made the “gradoni” famous — repeated uphill sprints on stadium terraces, a brutal aerobic workout that became a trademark of his idea of attacking, high-endurance football.

Marcelo Bielsa, during his time at Marseille, worked military-inspired obstacle courses into mountain running: climbing, balance-beam crossings, makeshift gym equipment for active recovery between sets of sit-ups. At Leeds, on his first pre-season camp, he had the squad collect litter for three hours — a gesture meant not to punish, but to remind players of the value of the fans' work that supports them.

Diego Simeone, at Atlético Madrid, built an entire team philosophy (“la mentalidad de guerrero”) around heavy physical workloads and a culture of collective sacrifice that runs through summer preparation too.

Alongside these “unconventional” approaches there's also a more technical and recurring strand: moderate-altitude camps, the subject of a recent study published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance (2025), which compared the effects of a cool high-altitude camp against a sea-level one on fitness, fatigue, and performance in professional footballers, confirming results consistent with earlier literature on the physiological responses to altitude training in team sports (McLean et al., 2013). In these cases the scientific component of the workload is as central as, if not more than, the symbolic one.

03 — BEYOND MUSCLE: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF THE TRAINING CAMP

Isolation, cohesion, mental toughness

The interesting question, from a sport psychology standpoint, isn't whether a training camp is “excessive”, but what mental function it serves beyond physical conditioning. Research on this point converges on a few recurring mechanisms.

Isolation and ritualisation. Relocating to a place removed from everyday life, the rigid structuring of the days, and the forced sharing of space and time create a sharp break from the regular season. This rupture functions as a rite of passage: the team that leaves the camp isn't, psychologically, the same one that entered it.

Cohesion built through shared hardship. A quasi-experimental study on 51 elite youth footballers showed that a team-building programme integrated into technical-tactical drills significantly improved cohesion, role clarity, group identification, and perceived collective efficacy compared with a control group. More recent research on adolescent athletes also confirms the link between training engagement and team cohesion, mediated by variables such as interpersonal competence and perceived social support. Shared difficulty, when experienced collectively rather than in isolation, tends to strengthen bonds rather than undermine them: it's the same principle behind “high-impact” team-building exercises adopted by professional teams in other sports too, where jointly overcoming a physically demanding challenge generates mutual trust and a sense of belonging.

Mental toughness and resilience. A recent line of research, grounded in Conservation of Resources Theory, has found a direct positive relationship between team cohesion and mental toughness, suggesting that the collective experience of a training camp — if well managed — can be a favourable context for developing individual psychological resources, not just physical results.

Within this frame, the preseason camp serves a function that goes well beyond kilometres covered: it defines hierarchies, tests individual psychological resilience, consolidates group identity, and communicates to players — through direct experience, not just words — what the team's non-negotiable standards are.

04 — THE FLIP SIDE: WHEN THE LOAD BECOMES A RISK

Overtraining syndrome and the cost of lost sleep

The same scientific literature that explains the psychological benefits of shared hardship warns of its limits. The key concept here is overtraining syndrome (OTS), a complex phenomenon involving dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis: in the early stages of functional overload, cortisol and ACTH response increases, but once overtraining becomes chronic this response flattens out — a pattern documented by several systematic reviews in sports endocrinology.

The associated psychological symptoms include irritability, low mood, sleep disturbances, reduced motivation, and, in more severe cases, genuine depressive states; available estimates suggest that between 7 and 20% of athletes report overtraining symptoms at some point in their career, with figures rising considerably (up to 30-100% in some cohorts) during particularly intense loading periods, such as a summer camp compressed into a few weeks. Part of the scientific community now prefers the term “unexplained underperformance syndrome”, precisely to stress that training load is only one variable at play, alongside sleep, nutrition, and general psychological state.

Sleep, in particular, deserves its own chapter: acute or chronic sleep deprivation — typical of camps with night-time wake-ups or closely packed multiple sessions — is associated with a documented worsening of reaction times, precision, decision-making, and emotional regulation, with effects that accumulate over time and that athletes themselves tend to underestimate. Recent research on footballers has also shown that sleep disruptions, more than total sleep duration, are linked to worse memory and perceived well-being; other studies point out that sleep deprivation among coaching staff can spread to the team climate too, reducing cohesion and effectiveness as perceived by the athletes themselves.

05 — A STRESS LABORATORY, IF DOSED WELL

Between supercompensation and overtraining

Putting these elements together, the preseason training camp takes shape as a genuine controlled experiment in psychophysical stress, whose outcome depends largely on dosage. Within the window of functional overreaching — intense but temporary fatigue, followed by recovery — the load produces supercompensation: improved physical condition and, as seen, stronger cohesion and mental toughness. Beyond that threshold, without an adequate balance between stimulus and recovery, the same mechanism becomes fertile ground for overtraining syndrome, with costs paid not in July but in October, when the drop in motivation and vulnerability to injury are felt in the thick of the season.

Seen through this lens, the Riestra case is less a curious anecdote than a small-scale natural experiment: a group that chose to turn an extreme workload into a shared identity narrative, within a social context (a working-class neighbourhood, a newly promoted team, a strong bond with supporters) that amplifies its cohesive potential. The same protocol, applied without that symbolic context or without scientific monitoring of internal load (subjective perception of fatigue, sleep quality, mood), would more easily risk sliding into overtraining.

For those working in sport, the practical lesson is that the preseason camp should be designed and monitored like any high-impact psychophysical intervention: setting goals (cohesion, mental resilience, tactical automatisms) distinct from the simple accumulation of kilometres, systematically measuring internal load indicators, and providing, alongside the fitness coach, a psychological presence able to tell in real time the fatigue that builds from the fatigue that starts to erode.

06 — IN SUMMARY: WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY

The data behind this analysis

SCIENTIFIC REFERENCES

All sources cited in this article can be verified through peer-reviewed scientific publications and public news articles.

1. Cadegiani, F. A., & Kater, C. E. EROS series of studies (Endocrine and Metabolic Responses on Overtraining Syndrome), International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance and Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport.
2. Frontiers in Network Physiology (2021). Overtraining Syndrome as a Complex Systems Phenomenon.
3. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance (2025). Impact of Preseason Training Camps on Fitness, Fatigue, and Performance in Professional Football Players: Mild-altitude Camp Versus Sea-level Camp. DOI: 10.1123/ijspp.2024-0555
4. McLean, B. D., Buttifant, D., Gore, C. J., White, K., & Liess, C. (2013). Physiological and performance responses to a preseason altitude-training camp in elite team-sport athletes. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 8(4), 391–399.
5. PMC (2023). An intervention program based on team building during tactical training tasks to improve team functioning. Quasi-experimental study of 51 elite youth footballers (experimental group n=27, control n=24).
6. Frontiers in Psychology (2025/2026). The effect of team cohesion on mental toughness: a mediation and moderation mixed study based on COR theory.
7. Behavioral Sciences / MDPI (2025). Adolescent Athlete Engagement and Team Cohesion in Football: A Moderated Mediation Model with Gender-Based Insights. Behavioral Sciences, 15(9), 1264.
8. Dove Medical Press — Nature and Science of Sleep (2024). Effects of Acute Sleep Deprivation on Sporting Performance in Athletes: a meta-analysis.
9. PMC9939841 (2023). Cognitive function in soccer athletes determined by sleep disruption and self-reported health, yet not by decision-reinvestment.
10. Suite, D. et al. (2026). Leadership Under Pressure: Coach Sleep, Decision-Making, and Team Functioning in Elite Sport. Psychiatric Times.
11. Psychiatric Times (2026). Sleep as Connective Tissue: Quantifying Team Dynamics in Elite Sports.

News sources: ESPN Argentina (5 January 2024), “La particular pretemporada de Deportivo Riestra, ¿al que madruga…?”; Diario de Cuyo (5 January 2024), “Insólito entrenamiento de Riestra a las 3 de la mañana a metros de un boliche de playa”; La Gaceta (6 January 2025; 9 January 2026), “Entrenamientos de madrugada y en la playa” and “La exigente pretemporada de Deportivo Riestra en la playa que terminó con un jugador descompuesto”; Doble Amarilla (8 June 2025), “Con su excéntrica rutina de entrenamientos, Deportivo Riestra da comienzo a su pretemporada”; Aire de Santa Fe (8 June 2025), “¿Vende humo?”; La Nueva (9 January 2026), “La excéntrica pretemporada de Riestra: entrenan a las 3.15 de la madrugada”; deportv.gob.ar (5 January 2026); Fanpage.it (2017), “I gradoni di Zeman, i percorsi militari di Bielsa: 5 folli allenamenti del calcio”; Ideacalcio.net (2026), “I diversi metodi della ‘follia’ di Marcelo Bielsa”.

Editorial note. This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not in any way replace a clinical assessment or a professional sport psychology programme. For personalised consultations for athletes, teams, or coaching staff, please contact Sport Psychology Center through the official website.