Big Mistakes of Football Training #1 – Long Runs

Around the country, thousands of amateur managers have been trying to use pre-season to build their players’ fitness levels in order to get them in the best possible shape for the first game of the season.

Unfortunately, due to many managers’ inability to shake off old ideas and a general lack of understanding about football fitness, training sessions can often prove largely ineffective, or sometimes counter-productive.

In this series, I’ll be looking at common mistakes made by managers during training sessions.

Mistake #1: Long Slow Runs

If you’re training your players for a 10k run, or an approaching half-marathon, long slow runs are ideal, I couldn’t recommend anything better. For football however, it’s a terrible idea.

During the warm-up, slow runs are fine, it’s a good way to loosen up your legs before suitable training starts. As the main training method, it will rid your players of any explosive speed, which is vital for football.

As a player, you run dozens of sprints between the distance of 5 and 10 metres during each match, with only box-to-box midfielders running a few 80 metre sprints. How often have you ever seen players running slowly around the pitch for minutes at a time?

Naturally, you want to be focusing on improving your explosive speed in order to make those 10 metre sprints as quick as possible, with a minimal recovery time. For this, you need to be doing interval training in which you alternate short bouts of intense sprinting whilst recovering with slow jogging or walking.

Sport-specific training can be much more simple than you would think, it’s all about realising how players work physically in a game, before creating effective and fun drills which simulate the work in order to optimise performance.

If you want to know how to go about doing a pre-season training programme, including various sprint drills, check out my 6 week guide here

(Image courtesy of Christopher S. Penn)

Related Posts:

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• Your Pre-Season Football Training Guide: Week 2
• Your Pre-Season Football Training Guide: Week 6
• Your Pre-Season Football Training Guide: Week 5
• Your Pre-Season Football Training Guide: Week 4