Warm up drill to improve soccer fitness
"Why should I waste my training time on fitness? If they're not fit, I won't play them!"
Good question.
Is it more important to work on technique, skills and tactics on training night and let the fitness take care of itself?
If they are not fit then technique and tactics go out of the window as they try to survive the rest of the game. So, you do need your players to be fit but you can waste time if you don't target your fitness properly.
I use this soccer drill once a month because you are specifically working on endurance/stamina during matches, so that if your attacker is put through against a defender in the last minute, he will still have the fitness to sprint on to the ball and get a shot away.
Alternating jogging and sprinting
If you set up a course like the first one in the picture above, you can get your players using alternate sprints and jogs to practise match-like situations. The sequence will be sprint, jog, sprint, jog.
- Tell your players to run the course alternating between top speed sprinting and slow jogging.
- One complete circle counts as a single repetition.
- Adjust the distance between points in relation to the age of your players and repeat five times.
Use the second picture (above) for sprints.
Tell your players to sprint from 1 to 6 and then back to 1.
- Rest at each point for the given amount of time. You can alter the times players wait at each point if they are finding the going tough.
- Repeat three times and build up over the weeks. Don’t let your players exhaust themselves.
These exercises are designed to get your players fit quickly. Make it more fun by getting team mates to shout out the number of seconds the runner has to wait.
From the The Ultimate Soccer Warm-Ups Manual, designed to put fun back into your training and make your soccer drills easier to coach.
Click here for a selection of warm-up and warm-down soccer (football) drills.
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