Improve Team Fitness
Now is a great time to improve your team's fitness! Underpinning all technical and tactical work is the ability to push our players to their limits. Executing game-plans and strategies are easy in team run throughs or at the start of the game but can your players stick to this under fatigue throughout the match?
You really don't need fancy equipment to start striving for great levels of fitness. Here's how we suggest you start!
Given that you only see your team 2x per week (if that) it's important to empower your players to take charge of their own fitness, give them examples of what to do and let them take pride in it!
It's also important that during training you keep as much technical relevance as possible in your conditioning. Making it fun is also a bonus! In this next video we can see some conditioning exercises that also progress into a technical practice.
Without player buy-in however you will have very little success in improving fitness. Players have to do a lot of work themselves, being self-motivated is what will drive your players. Professional players have a huge incentive to strive for, your role as a grassroots coach is to create a level of motivation for the coming season.
Mental fitness is essential and is an aspect that many coaches accept without really providing any guidence on how to improve it!
It's important to incorporate all of these aspects into your teams fitness and conditioning plan. In short:
- Give them the power and knowledge to take charge of their own fitness.
- Ensure you include fitness into technial areas of your sessions.
- Give your players incentives to improve fitness.
- Discuss mental fitness with your players.