Academic routines help children learn better, concludes researcher Gaea Leinhardt of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center. In her studies of mathematics teaching in elementary classrooms, she found that the major difference between expert and novice teachers was the use of well-practiced routines.

If you are changing the warm-up games and skill sessions every practice, you are doing double duty. First, you are teaching a game with new rules and strategy that the kids are trying to figure out, then you are trying to work on technique and skills. Throwing this at kids all at once is very overwhelming and may lead to frustration for you, the coach, and for the player because it is too much for them to process.

I highly recommend having a routine for your practices and keep your warm-up games to a couple that you can rotate (assuming a 2x per week practice). This way the kids learn the games and you can then help them concentrate on skills that you’d like them to improve.

I use the following routine for my practice:

1) Dribbling skills warm- all kids with a ball and with a variety of dribbling drills in an area of the field.  They carry cones and drop them on a magic word to dribble between, they just dribble in an area and I call out different skills to work on. (I use 3 different warm-up for dribbling)

2) Small warm-up game that has a focus for the day – dribbling or passing/shooting (depending on age, I use 2 or 3 different games, so they aren’t learning new rules). The game should lead into your subject for the day. Either it sets the stage for a dribbling technique or a passing/shooting technique.

3) Technique session – this changes often and depends on what the kids did during the previous game. If they are young it is just important to hit the major technique issues. This is where variety is good, so long as the kids are ready for the work.

4) SSG – with U8 and below I like to keep the SSG to a max of 3v3. The kids love 1v1 and as the most important aspect of soccer play, I work with 1v1 at least once per week..

If you keep some routine to your practice, you will keep your frustration and the players frustration to a minimum. You will also see an increase in the absorption of the skills you are teaching.

Here is an example of a warm-up game that I use that can cover many different “techniques”, but the kids don’t know it and they don’t have to learn a new set of rules each time:

I use a game called pac-man, the kids run around in a rectangle or circle are “pac-men”. The kid in the middle with the ball is the “ghost” and has to hit the players running around with a shot to their legs (they have to hit them below the waist for the pac man to become a ghost). The other rules are the pac-men have to always be running/jogging and they can’t run out of the field. This game allows, you as a coach to work on a number of things. The kids run to space so they don’t get hit, they need to always keep their eyes on the ball and they need to make sure they are aware of the field. The ghosts are working on dribbling and getting their heads up, hard shots/passes where they lead the player running and dribbling skills.

As you can see, you can reinforce many things with this one warm-up game, but you don’t have to explain rules at every practice. Practices will move faster and be more focused. You and your players will get more out of every practice.

You can read more about teaching routines HERE.

Last year I tried to create coaching sessions and ensure that fitness was gained through the small sided games and drills. I coach girls, so it may be completely different with boys, but I found that the intensity that they brought to training wasn’t intense enough to achieve the necessary fitness levels through this type of training. Previous to this little experiment of expecting fitness to be gained through drills/SSGs, I had always incorporated fitness into our training sessions and we’d been quite successful with a record of 46-3-2 over 2 years.

We went to a tournament and were destroyed, some due to our fitness, some due to the fact we were playing U12 soccer with eleven 10-year old players, and partly because we moved to the full size field. The coach I was speaking with, as many coaches are, was focusing too much on fitness and not enough on teaching soccer.

For those of you who don’t believe fitness should be part of every training session, I have a few questions:

• How do you keep up your forward run, if all you want to do is pass the ball so you can stop and watch?
• How are you going to get back on defense after the attacking run?
• How are you going to pressure the attacker, if you are tired?
• How are you going to decide to take a player 1v1, if you just want to pass because you are tired?
• And the most important, how do you make good decisions if the brain isn’t working due to a lack of oxygen?

Here is how our fitness regimen worked and it worked very well as we became a team that handled the fitness requirements of an entire game vs. barely playing a good 15 minutes at the beginning of the season.

• Team would warm up with dribbling exercises, coerver drills, dribbling in crowded spaces and then a game of takeaway (half the team in a square with the ball, half without – those without try to take other player’s balls, those without a ball at end, get 10 pushups).
• Team would go through some dynamic stretching (zombie walks, butt-kickers, jogging, hopping, carioca, shuffles, sprints)
• Team lines up and would run just under half a mile in 3.5 minutes
• Those who didn’t make the 3.5 minutes would get to do it again
• Those who didn’t make the 3.5 the 2nd time would get 1/3 less distance in 2 min. 20 seconds
• Those who didn’t make that would run half of that in 1 min. 10 seconds.

Half way through practice, before we went to our 6v6 or 8v8 part of practice, we’d do a fitness regimen again. Sometimes it’d be the above or it would be an exercise where the girls were lined up about 15 yeards from a partner and would have to chase each other down. The winner moved up a lvl in the drill the loser moved down. Bottom half would have to do push-up or one lap at the end.

After the first two practices of running the top portion of the fitness drills, all girls would make the first leg, so the fitness would only take about 4 minutes total and the second session would take anywhere from a  repeat of the 4 minutes to a more lengthy 10 minutes. So, in a 90 minute workout the girls would spend 15 minutes (16% of the practice time) working on their fitness.

The good thing about this approach is that the least fit get the most fitness workout and it puts the responsibility in their court. I’d say at the beginning, “make the first 3:30 so we can get to start playing.” I was on their side, but I’d hold them accountable and they knew that’s what I was there. As their fitness became better, nobody would complain/roll their eyes, huff and puff about having to run. I’d be sure to point out to them after games that we’d controlled the second half or the middle of the field, or possession because of their fitness.

Their fitness became a badge of honor, even as it became easier for them to maintain. Besides being fit, their overall game improved. There thought process was positive as they would take players on 1v1, close down an attacker, cover the far post after a 50-yard breakaway and create space by passing and moving.

I’m sorry, but the game isn’t 15 minutes long, for these girls it is 60 and to have fun and find success they need to be fit.

Plyometrics is a type of exercise training designed to produce fast, powerful movements, and improve the functions of the nervous system, generally for the purpose of improving performance in sports. Plyometric movements, in which a muscle is loaded and then contracted in rapid sequence, use the strength, elasticity and innervation of muscle and surrounding tissues to jump higher, run faster, throw farther, or hit harder, depending on the desired training goal. Plyometrics is used to increase the speed or force of muscular contractions, often with the goal of increasing the height of a jump.

Plyometric training involves practicing plyometric movements to toughen tissues and train nerve cells to stimulate a specific pattern of muscle contraction so the muscle generates as strong a contraction as possible in the shortest amount of time. A plyometric contraction involves first a rapid muscle lengthening movement, followed by a short resting phase, then an explosive muscle shortening movement, which enables muscles to work together in doing the particular motion. Plyometric training engages the myostatic-reflex, which is the automatic contraction of muscles when their stretch nerve receptors are stimulated.

Plyometric exercises use explosive movements to develop muscular power. Plyometric training acts on the nerves, muscles, and tendons to increase an athlete’s power output without necessarily increasing their maximum strength.

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