There are countless debates on the PPM forums regarding the best attribute balance to use. While many are talking about 100-80-60, 2-1-1 and 4-3-2, nobody seems to be talking about a seemingly "less important" issue; the best order to train your players.

In all honesty, that depends on how you look at it. Personally I am of the belief that the attributes essentially tell us the order of priority they should be trained in; primary, followed by each of the secondary attributes. I want to take a little time however to explain 1 or 2 theories regarding attributes that would or could affect the order we train them.

It is theorised that the players star rating is most strongly affected by the primary attribute, so if you were wanting to build a team that looked good on a ratings pov, then building the primary before the others is the way you want to go.

We know that PIMs are for the most part caused by a players aggression attribute being higher than the players technique attributes. The way to fix this common PIM problem is to simply focus training on the technique attribute until it surpasses the aggression. Saying that, Wingers and Centers both use the technique attribute as part of their core attribute group, so you're going to want this to be high anyway. If you're training your centers or wings and had to choose between training offense or technique, and your player had a PIM issue, then naturally opting to train the technique could be the wiser option.

If you've run training camps for your players you would know how good the extra training can be. The question then, is how to best train your players in the lead-up to a training camp... which means PLANNING weeks in advance to your camps starting. Not planned this far ahead for a camp before? You'd be amazed how good the idea can be.

Here's how my strategy works. At the training camp you want to train your players core attributes (generally), but as you would know, some attributes have a higher quality than others, so will train at a higher rate. What I do is look at which attributes i'm going to need to train and in the weeks building up to the training camp, will train the HIGHER quality attributes. At the training camp, i then focus on the lower quality attribute. I know, this makes no sense right? Afterall, surely i'd want to get BIG training bonuses for my players at camp? See, while this does make sense, what my theory does is helps your lower quality attributes train (at the training camp) at around the same speed / level your higher quality attributes do on a normal day. It may not appear to be a good idea, but over the length of the season, your players will train better overall. This only applies of course if you are very strict about how balanced your players attributes are.

At the end of the day, the order you train your attributes is personal preference. In this article i've outlined just 3 different things that could affect the way you train. Do you have any others? Please leave a comment with your preferred training methods.