So with a blink of an eye pre-season is upon us, the kids are about to break for the summer holiday’s, and with the Premier League starting on 17th August everyone wants to get back into the swing of thing’s again.
All media attention will be on teams returning back for pre-season, with clips of players being put through their paces on the training field getting their fitness levels up for the coming season. The tendency as a youth coach is to echo this and focus the return to pre-season training around fitness – as this is ordinarily your experience from when you were younger – but is this the best approach to take?
A lot will depend on the age of your players, and the stage they are at in terms of their growth, maturation, and development. Whilst taking the players for a run, or getting them to do shuttles is easy to organise and doesn’t take too much planning – if the players haven’t developed the ability to train anaerobically the shuttles will be a waste of time, and the chances of a group of young players entertaining a 20 minute run, let alone complete it is slim.
Your best bet is to make everything game based, small-sided games are a natural form of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) where young players can naturally manage their own workloads, and the you can increase (or decrease) the intensity and volume of the activity by manipulating the pitch size, number of players, and duration of the games.
Pre-season is also an opportunity to introduce your players to some key fundamental movement skills, introducing them to some core exercises that will form the foundation of a strength and power development programme in the season ahead.
Recommended exercises:
• Body Weight Squats
• Squat Jumps
• Body Weight Lunges
• Walking Lunges
From my experience you need to keep your players engaged, make sure they have a ball at their feet (or in their hands) as often as possible, make activities short and sharp but at a high intensity with lots of energy, and above all make thing’s fun!
Not sure what to do with your players for pre-season – check out my 6 week, age appropriate GET READY pre-season programme at www.healthyactive.co.uk/pre-season or click Download below.
Healthy Active 