Football Training

This week at football training I wanted to start incorporating fitness into the training sessions as the team haven’t yet touched on it and felt it was now necessary to start as we are playing tougher opponents in weeks to come. My aim for the session was to have 1/3 of it training fitness,1/3 technical and the last 1/3 of training being a match.

The component I looked at was interval training where players would be sprinting and then walking. The drill was set up so that everyone was paired up and you would race someone to introduce competition to decrease the chance of people becoming bored. The drill starts by doing 10 sprints over 20 yards, then 8 sprints over 30 yards, then 5 sprints over 40 yards and finally 1 sprint over 60 yards. To gain full potential from this drill each player needs to put 100% into the sprints. The distances are sport specific to football as ‘According to match analysis the maximal sprinting distance is on average 20-30m’ (Withers et al. 1984) therefore the distances I picked should be relevant. A picture of the drill is below (Black square: Participant, Red Square: 20, 30, 40, 60 yards, Black Line: Path of the participant sprinting, Red Line: Path of the participant walking back)

To change things round for the players, the second drill was a possession grid where all players were split into two teams. The aim is to keep the ball between your team for as long as possible whilst the other team are trying to retrieve possession. Differentiation is often added to this drill, such as limited amount of passes and changing team sizes. This drill is to improve passing, movement and special awareness.

I finished training off with a match till the end of training. I wanted to see what was worked on in the possession grid to take effect in the match, and therefore the rule of limited touches remained. This should make players pass more and produce more 1/2 passes to get around the pitch.

Overall I thought that training went very well, the majority of players felt the strain of the sprints post training, therefore it had an effect on their body and was an effective drill. Everything went to plan during this training session therefore I have no weaknesses this week. But this could be because the drills were fairly simple and not complex therefore the margin for error was small.

Withers, R. T, Maricic, Z, Wasilewski, S and Kelly, L. (1984) Match analysis of Australian professional soccer players. J. Hum. Movement Studies pp 159-176