What can you do to improve your teams fitness?
How is your team’s overall fitness?
I bet it needs help.
It doesn’t matter what sport it is and it doesn’t matter what ages you’re coaching. High school football to age-group swimming kids need to improve their strength and endurance. They probably need to work on speed, agility and balance as well.
Finding time to put in conditioning drills and exercises can be difficult. Whatever the sport there’s a lot of skill work that has to be taught as well.
And if you’re coaching a youth sport team that only practices once or twice a week, it’s probably impossible. My son’s youth flag football team practiced once a week…on the same day they had games. They even did a lot of running and agility work. I’m not sure how productive it was but it certainly kept them busy!
If I was coaching a youth team that needed more conditioning there’s one thing I would try to do.
Have fitness homework for the kids. And get the parents involved as well.
There’s lots of advantages to doing this:
Fitness Advantage #1 It gives fitness and the team’s success to the kids to be responsible.
Fitness Advantage #2. Makes them realize that fitness and sports is not just a “at practice” event
Fitness Advantage #2. It works
It doesn’t have to take a lot of time. And it doesn’t need a lot of fancy exercises or details.
I think a short and sweet routine is much better than something that’s too long. Make it so short and easy to remember that they do it.
Even something as simple as ten push-ups and sit-ups every day will develop fitness and skills that will last a lifetime.
What do you think? Give it a try and let me know.
