THE BASIC FITNESS PROGRAM

Normally practice sessions will take place twice a week. When doing youth football coaching drills, it’s important to concentrate on fitness training and basics on one day and fitness training followed by small sided games on the other day. You need to keep your practice sessions lively and interesting.  

A favorite fitness routine of mine is listed below. Remember you don’t want to spend your entire coaching session doing fitness drills. You will do three sets of ten repetitions per exercise. Run the program from points 2-6 as a circuit.

1)     Jog 50 meters with a sprint of 50 meters. Do this three times before carrying on with the other exercises below (remember that each player must have a soccer ball when doing this).

2)     Air squats. Stand with feet shoulder width apart. Squat down keeping the chest up, low back straight and the glutes back. Squat down as low as you can go while keeping the lower back as straight as possible.

3)     Lateral lunge & reach. Lunge to one side and reach down towards the floor with both arms, touching the floor with both hands flat. Come back up and repeat on the other side.

4)     Knee push-ups. Start in a plank position with arms fully extended, then lower your knees to the ground. Your head, chest and back should be in alignment. Lower your body until your chest is about 1” off the floor. Push your body back up into the starting position.

5)     Over unders. Pretend that there is a hurdle about knee high next to you. Start by stepping over the “hurdle” with both legs (one at a time). Once over the other side, come back under the “hurdle”. Make sure that you bend forward from the hip, keeping your lower back straight. Repeat this going one way and then the other way.

6)     Split squat jumps. Start in a split stance. Go down into a lunge position until the thigh is parallel with the floor. Explosively jump up as high as possible. Land softly in the same lunge position. Repeat consecutively.

7)     Sprint 50 meters and then jog 50 meters. Do this once only.

I have been involved with sport fitness training for the past twenty-five years and I believe in building leg strength to improve both speed and stamina. Follow this program for a three week period doing it once a week.

Cheers for now.

Mike

P.S. I will look at the second fitness training program next time.