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Fit 4 football
Improving your team’s fitness in the pre-season period could be the key to a winning start. These practices aim to develop fitness through the use of a range of movements, changes of speed and the use of small-sided games.
What this session is about
- Preparing for the new season
- Getting fit.
- Working on football specific fitness.
What to think about
- When returning to training for the new season, it is important that your players don’t just run in order to get fit.
- Footballers rarely sprint for more than 20 yards in a game, however, they do change direction, change speed, jump, challenge for possession and communicate.
- Create training circuits or games that enable the players to work at developing the skills and physical fitness to play football at their best level.
- If you don’t have a ladder, create one with pairs of cones.
Set-up
For the session and development use a 25-yard square area. Use an area 50 yards long by 40 yards wide for the game situation.
| Warm up | Session | Development | Game Situation | Warm Down |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes | 10 minutes | 10 minutes | 25 minutes | 5 minutes |
What you get your players to do
Split your squad into four teams and set up a circuit course. Each team has a player at each corner.
Players work at top speed to get from one team mate to the next by completing the exercises in their path. Once a player reaches the next corner, they tag the next player to set their team mate off.
Ladders – players step through the ladders.
Poles – players sidestep to slalom the poles.
Coach – players receive a pass and then make a return pass to the coach before sprinting to the next corner.
Cones – players must take forward and backward steps in and out of the cones.
Development
Players all work inside the area created by the obstacles. Players have one ball between them. Each must play with two touches (one to control and one to pass).
After passing the ball, the player runs to complete one of the exercises. Once the player has completed the exercise they run back to the centre of the pitch and look to receive a pass to repeat the practice.
The players complete a different exercise than last time on the circuit course.
This circuit works continuously for two sets of four minutes with a two-minute break. The circuit forces players to change speed and direction.
Related Files
Game situation
The players in each team are given a number, excluding the goalkeepers.
On your call, the two players (from one team only), whose numbers you have called, run off the pitch to the corners and then back into the pitch to continue in the game.
The players complete this at top speed as the game continues with their team mates overloaded 4v6.
The game is played for two sets of 10 minutes with a two-minute rest.
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