Can I ask you a question, Coach? she asked.
Of course, fire away.
Are we ever going to do any actual conditioning?
If I were prone to conspiracy theories, I’d swear the kid was a plant—this conversation popped up after one of my June practices, just as online disputes were coming to a boil regarding Tony Holler and Brad Dixon’s Sprint-Based Football clinic, which set about challenging traditional views on conditioning and weekly training volumes for high school football.
This player, an incoming freshman, had just joined my multisport soccer team and with new players, the most common question I get is “why do we always jump so much?” The answer to that I have down: “To help you girls get faster, more explosive, and build resilience in a sport where a lot of kids your age get injured. And since no one’s ever taught most of you how to jump, if you leave my team able to hop, jump, backpedal, skip, and sprint, whatever else happens, that’s a win.”
The conditioning question, though, was a first because…my practices aren’t a walk in the park. But, like many teen soccer players, she was accustomed to finishing practices either spread out on a line and running gassers or knocking out laps around the pitch.
You’re not tired, I asked?
No, I’m pretty pooped, she said.
What did we do that made you tired, do you think?
Well, there were the sprints and jumps at the start and the passy-thingy and then the transition game was pretty tiring.
Right, I said. That’s the conditioning.
No, she said. But I mean conditioning-conditioning, like running after practice. Do we ever do that?
Conditioned to Conditioning
A few years ago, I interviewed Darcy Norman, Performance Coach with the US Men’s National Soccer Team, and he defined conditioning simply as: the ability to endure the demands of what is put in front of you. For many youth soccer players, what is regularly put in front of them are:
- Jogging laps before and/or after practice.
- Repeat “sprints” box to box or corner flag to corner flag.
- Line drills, gassers, suicides (whatever clever and catchy name you prefer to call COD sprints to failure).
- Sets of burpees or push-ups, either as punishments for failing to execute a technical, tactical, physical, or mental skill in the course of practice or just because burpees are hard.
Most 12-16 year-oIds do not have the natural ability to endure repeat sets of 20 burpees or 100-yard gassers or 20-30-40-50-yard repeat sprints. Soccer is a hard sport and running 100-yard gassers is hard and youth soccer coaches assume that if they can get their players conditioned for that second hard thing it will, by some clear-cut application of the transitive property, prepare their athletes for the first hard thing. And if those demands are put in front of the players practice after practice, over time, they will become conditioned to endure those practice conditions.