Kids Soccer Drills: How To warm Up Correctly
4th March, 2010
In kids soccer drills, it’s surprising that warm up before playing is considered unimportant. It is something that being a coach, I would want to stress that warming up is obligatory and an important practice to lead the team towards a better start of the day. This issue is conveniently ignored as unimportant by the coaches in youth soccer drills. The consequences are then faced by the players when they suffer injuries in training.
This article gives you some nice tips on how to get the team warmed up. Teach the kids to include all the body movements that allow all muscles in the body to get worked up. This is the right way to wake up the entire nervous system. Doing things fast can lead to cramps or stiffness in the muscles.
Tip 1: Have the players jog for about 5-7 minutes initially. It is highly recommended to start with a light jog and then eventually sprint. Check that the pulse rate in this reaches 120 beats per minute. But, slow improvement is better. This should be followed by players moving their legs backward and forward for approximately 10 minutes each. Lastly, have them actively stretch their body over 20 yards.
Tip 2: When we talk about this active stretching over 20 yards, a few warm up exercises of its own must go along with it. For example, have your players skip back and forth. Also teach your players to do cross stepping. Also teach them high-knee carioca. These must be executed as if sprinting.
Backward run is also a highly effective warm up drill in soccer drills for kids. Still, in order to perform it, the proper way to do it is to jerk up the heels to the butt. It’s actually tough to practice it like this but there’s no choice as it’s the single most and right way of doing it.
Tip 3: There are other essential warm up exercises in kids soccer drills that build up the momentum to the actual session. You can direct your players to play with circles and hoops. These give an added element to the skipping exercises. You can also make them cross-over skip. Although a little advanced, Quick Hip Swings is also a very effective and tested method that warms up the body a great deal.
Then you can tell your players to do long shuffles with rotations in the middle. The players should be made to practice moving their legs backward and forward. This is a highly effective and useful body toning activity. High leg forwards and backward is just as efficient in toning the body.
Tip 4: Stretching should be adequate and correctly executed. For the legs, stretch hinging works the best. Make sure all players have worked out their quadriceps, calves, hamstring, and groin without fail. It is stretching that helps in increasing the range of muscles together with preventing any injury to the player.
Also ensure that in soccer drills for youth, kids are discouraged from overdoing anything. They have the tendency to get carried away in excitement and injure themselves as a result.
Because all the relevant information on kids soccer drills is shared with you, please see that training sessions are always followed by warm up sessions. You can get a variety of information on same topic on our youth soccer coaching community. Sign up now to benefit from it.
Andre Botelho is known online as “The Expert Youth Soccer Coach” and his free ebooks and reports have been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Learn how to skyrocket your players’ skills and make practice sessions fun in record time. Download your free ebook at: Youth Soccer Drills.
Tags: Kids soccer drills, soccer drills, soccer drills youth, youth soccer coaching, youth soccer drills, youth soccer practice