Extra Fitness Drills? The Problem Isn't the Kids, It's Your Session Design

Youth Football Fitness?

Physical fitness, being strong... this is a topic players can't avoid.

It's also a reason many coaches use to punish children. A dogmatic traditional belief holds that for children who want to play football well, you must build up your physical fitness, especially after you turn 10.

It seems like everyone thinks this is fine, but it's actually a long-standing misconception in youth development circles, and the problem is quite serious.

What do you think when you see (or your own training involves) a group of children doing gym exercises on a football pitch?

The footballs are placed on the sideline. A group of 9-year-olds, under the coach's command, are doing shuttle sprints back and forth, followed by several sets of push-ups.

Does this feel familiar? We often see the last 10 minutes of many sessions turned into this kind of "triathlon" training activity, all in the name of "building the children's physical fitness." These children who may only train twice a week are forced to spend a precious 20 minutes trying to become Olympic athletes.

All of this, at its root, is because the concept of "physical fitness" has been chronically misunderstood in youth football education for many years.

Where Is the Problem?

A group of eight-year-olds are punished with shuttle sprints on the sideline for failing to meet the training requirements.

Few coaches or parents question what purpose this actually serves, because most people think this is how professional football trains and there's nothing wrong with children doing the same.

But let's think together now: why are the children failing to meet the training requirements?

If you want to train 8-year-olds' dribbling skills, and your session design has one child dribbling through all the cones while the other 9 children wait in line on the side.

Never mind children, even adults who never like queuing would get fidgety on the sideline, touching this, poking that, their attention severely scattered. More importantly, the queuing you designed has cut each child's practice time and training volume by 90%.

"Physical fitness" training, or punishment, is a method used by incompetent coaches who don't understand session design.

Perhaps for some misbehaving children, we need to include small disciplinary measures in training, but "doing fitness" and "getting stronger" should absolutely not be forms of punishment.

This approach was abandoned in modern youth development philosophy over 20 years ago.

Ball Work Is What Matters Most

Children who enjoy playing football today spend no more than 3 hours per week on average at the club for more structured training. They come to your club to have more contact and interaction with football, not for basketball, baseball, or fitness training.

While "physical fitness" is one element of football, don't forget what matters most: football IQ and ball mastery. When children only have 180 minutes of football training per week and you're making them spend 20 minutes doing sprints and push-ups, that means at an age when their muscles and bones haven't even fully developed, children are losing one-ninth of their ball contact time every week.

Do the math: over an average 15-week term, out of 45 total hours of training, 5 hours are spent on gym-style fitness. Is that appropriate?

This isn't professional football.

"My players aren't strong enough, so in the last 20 minutes of many matches, the team concedes lots of goals, mainly because the kids don't have enough stamina."

There are many reasons why children "lack stamina," but every time, parents and coaches subconsciously attribute it to the children's "physical fitness" being insufficient.

Why Do Your Children "Lack Stamina"?

Does it have anything to do with scheduling "fitness training" at the end of every session? What did you do for the first 50 minutes of each session? Was it a long warm-up followed by jumping straight to "fitness training"?

Session design is an art form. Every football-related problem children face can be solved through football-related session design. Are your technical drills and small-sided games intense enough? Does the session require children to frequently change speed, change direction, accelerate through challenges, recover quickly, and compete physically?

When your session is well designed, children should feel tired by the end while also having improved their skill level. Extra "physical fitness" training should never be a mandatory part of every session. If it is, it's because the coach's session design is flawed, the problem lies in the structure, yet children get blamed for "poor fitness" and "needing extra conditioning."

Perhaps you think you've never made children do "extra conditioning" and you're fine. But think more broadly: do you have children run laps around the pitch to warm up before training? As someone who isn't a professional academy coach, do you believe that separate fitness training for children is really necessary?

When you sit down and think about it calmly, you'll realize that these bad habits passed down from professional football keep being comfortably applied to 8-year-olds, while we constantly feel "very professional" as coaches. But have you considered whether lap-running fitness training is the same thing as match fitness in football? Have you considered that the root cause of these deficiencies might be massive problems with your own session design and content?

We are developing children who love football. Their flair and feel for the ball don't come from training that has nothing to do with the ball.

Instead of making children do 5 minutes of push-ups, could you give them 5 more minutes of dribbling? Could your session design give children 200 touches on the ball within 5 minutes?

Physical fitness and endurance are the natural byproducts of a well-designed, ball-focused training session.

And as parents, when you hear that your child's school team has them running 5 kilometers every morning, you shouldn't feel satisfied. You should ask yourself: are they training long-distance runners, or young footballers?