Stop Wasting Your Players' Time: The "3L Rule" to Maximize Training Efficiency

Training Efficiency

There's a concept in economics that most people are familiar with: ROI (Return on Investment), the value returned from an investment. Everyone strives for high ROI.

In our previous articles, we've been exploring just how reasonable and scientific our current training methods really are. From an ROI perspective, we want the time and effort invested by coaches, parents, and especially children to yield the maximum possible return.

We can call this ROT, Return on Training.

It's no exaggeration to say that the ROT of many current training sessions is extremely low. Let's do the math: a typical youth club trains twice a week with one match, over 8-week terms, totaling about 32 weeks per year. Most sessions have at least 10 minutes of "waiting time," "lecture time," and so on, hardly what you'd call efficient.

Added up, many children waste roughly 10% of their total training time each year. Over ten years of playing, that's at least 100 hours.

That's 6,000 minutes. In a lifetime, how many blocks of 6,000 minutes do we actually get to spend on football?

We need to invest more thought into session design.

How Do We Improve ROT?

Look at the options below and choose which action occurs most frequently in a match:

• Shooting

• Heading

• Passing

• Crossing

• Dribbling

- Making decisions

The answer is obvious. For the majority of a match, children need to make a huge number of rapid decisions in response to a constantly changing game environment, where to run, who to pass to, how to position themselves, when to shoot, and so on.

So if decision-making is the most frequent action in football, how should we train this skill in children?

Just like in all aspects of education, parents know that if we strip children of the right to make their own decisions during their development, their creativity and ability to think independently will be severely limited.

The same is true in the world of football.

What Is Decision-Making?

At your child's next training session, observe carefully and ask yourself: are the children actually making decisions today, or are they just following instructions in a "football drill routine"?

Running from one cone to another, passing to a designated player, dribbling around cones, doing a fancy obstacle course run... none of these involve decision-making. They're just "football drill routines."

True decision-making means reading the environment, understanding the options available in a specific situation, and choosing your own actions based on real-time information on the pitch.

So how exactly do we create training sessions filled with countless decision-making moments for children?

The 3L Rule

In European and American youth football, there's a widely recognized golden rule for session design called "No Lines, No Laps, No Lectures." The meaning is self-explanatory, but doesn't it also make you wonder why so many of our training sessions do the exact opposite?

No Lines

Everyone is familiar with the sight of line-up drills: the coach has children queue up and take turns practicing, like doing group calisthenics, neat rows, perfect order, parents satisfied.

This kind of queuing gives us the illusion that the children, as a group, are training very seriously, which leads us to believe that every child is learning something.

But the reality is the opposite. These orderly, seemingly high-success-rate queuing drills drastically reduce each child's ball contact time and touches. The actual training load is completely disproportionate to the session length.

Never mind children, even adults would get fidgety standing in line on the sideline, touching this, poking that, their attention severely scattered. It can even cause children to gradually lose interest in football altogether, wandering off to a corner.

No Laps

No laps, our previous article "Extra Fitness Drills? The Problem Isn't the Kids, It's Your Session Design" already explained in detail why football fitness and general long-distance running fitness are completely different things.

If you say laps are just for warming up, wouldn't warm-up activities that are more fun and closer to actual match play be more appropriate?

"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 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? Was it a long warm-up followed by jumping straight to "fitness training"? Was the session full of waiting time from queuing?

Session design is an art form. Every football-related problem children face can be solved through football-related session design. Are the 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?

No Lectures

This point has two layers of meaning: first, don't spend too much time lecturing; second, regardless of when during training, coaches should not talk too much, no matter what your intention is.

The younger the children, the shorter their attention span. Similar to queuing, if we spend too much time lecturing or moralizing in a session, children's focus on and interest in football will drop significantly.

The second layer relates to the concept of "over-coaching" we've discussed before: when children are playing, the coach continuously interrupts, giving too many coaching points, to the extent that it interferes with the children's ability to explore and experiment on their own, suppressing their creativity.

Put simply, it's the coach acting as a "helicopter parent," helping children learn every touch, making all the decisions for them in training. Under this kind of "spoon-fed teaching," children become players controlled by the coach's joystick.

We've heard all the wisdom in the world, yet we still can't live a good life.

The ideal approach is to set aside small windows during breaks in training to guide children and ask them questions. When we spot issues during training, instead of stopping the whole session as we used to, we simply walk over to one child and quietly share our thoughts and questions.

Sometimes we instinctively feel that immediate guidance is crucial, but if you find yourself constantly talking during the coaching process, that's a warning sign. Stop, observe, and let children make their own decisions, that's what truly helps children learn and grow independently.

The 3L Rule exists so that when we design training sessions, we focus on building an environment and set of rules that encourage independent decision-making.

Decision-making, high-efficiency participation, maximizing ROT, this mindset and these principles are the true starting point for treating youth development as education.

Make the change. Start with the "3L Rule."