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Youth Football Conditioning End of Practice
I believe in having the team do some kind of end of the practice conditioning, but not for the reason you may think. I do not believe in getting the players “into shape”. These are young kids and they are either in shape, or not in shape. There is not enough time during a three-month season to “run” kids into shape.
Far too many “coaches” think they are toughening up the kids by running the pi*s out of them. This is flat out wrong and a waste of time. This is always a sure sign of some insecure jerk who does not know what he is doing, but puts on this ridiculous “military approach” to conditioning. Please report the idiots to the league administration so they can possibly remove him.
Please note that I am not talking about “contact” shape. Contact shape is the actual physical contact involved in the sport of football. Every player will need to be acclimated to contact each year. I am referring to the speed of the players and their conditioning. I am not saying that conditioning does not help, but I am saying that you will only get some much good out of conditioning.
I believe you can work on the snap count, passing, tackling receiving and many other skills by incorporating them into the team-conditioning portion of practice. I believe team unity comes together with many of the different conditioning drills I run.
I will list some of the more popular conditioning drills, which include
- Sprints – I run these on a different snap count to teach the team to stay on side.
- Ladders – I never run these
- Gassers – Never, ever, ever do I have the players run these.
- Indian Run – I like this one a few times a year
- Bear Crawling – Rarely
- Crab Crawling – Rarely
- Sharks and Minnows – Only at the Flag Level
- Passing Relays – The kids love this one
- Triangle Tackling – A new one I learned that I will use more and more
- Pass Attack – Great team builder!
- Fumble Drill
I give a complete description of all of these conditioning drills and the exact way I use them in my book.
For my complete article on this topic please purchase my book.
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