Every youth coach or even Senior coach are permanently working with a select group of players (their team) where all of them are following a coaching plan based on general fitness, skills, passing exercises and more …
But have you ever thought about one thing?
Each individual player is unique, and each individual player has different strengths, weaknesses and needs. It’s very difficult to generalise training sessions to fully benefit each individual player especially in a Youth developing phase where all players have different physical abilities and different stages of maturity also.
On a senior level, I fully believe individual or small group sessions can make a massive impact on overall team performance during a game. If you are involved closely in this game, it is not new for you to realise that every position on the field requires different styles of play (passing ability, skill ability and more importantly fitness).
As an example, I’ll use the 4-3-3 formation, which has many different variations that can be used during a game. My variation is based on one defensive midfielder being able to switch the ball with medium and long passes from right to left site of the field.
So you can guess that my right back (wingback) and left back (wingback) are in a permanent physical workout throughout the game working at a very high intensity. Their fitness is based on medium to large sprinting ability (15-30m sometimes 40m) with a minimum time to fully recover.
Can you compare this player I’ve mentioned to his colleagues playing in the centre back position?
If you have ever played this game you will notice the difference in fitness levels. If you haven’t, just take some time during one of the games of Barcelona, Bayern Munich or Real Madrid and focus on Daniel Alves, David Alaba or Fabio Coentrao.
I’ll write about it more at a later time but for now I’m looking forward to the discussion 😉 … What’s your thoughts?