On Tuesday nights I go play pickup soccer. I got there early tonight and several youth practices were under way. The teams present were any where from U7 rec to a decent U12 youth club team. I feel what I saw was indicative of a majority of training sessions in the United States and it clued me in as to why there are so many questions about how to get young players fitter.
What I saw could be summed up as: lines and low-intensity. Most of the practices had lines that represented decent work to rest ratios (1 active, 3 resting for 1v1s) but the games were of such low-intensity that they needed less rest or increase the work rate to get them into a cardiovascular training zone.
Increase the intensity and the fitness will follow. Increasing intensity also doesn't mean simply yelling at them to run faster. Give the players a reason to run fast, give them a reason to go harder. Design activities/drills/games that will bring this out in a natural way.
Below is an example of an activity that I modified from a recent Coerver course I attended. It's just your traditional 1v1 with a twist. Red starts off with the ball and dribbles toward blue and initiates a leave/takeover. As soon as red leaves she takes off around the third cone and blue tries to attack the goal. This is a fun one that my kids enjoy, it gets very competitive and they are running at full sprint for most of it. Adjust the distances of the cones if it's too easy/hard for attackers or defenders. Adjust orientation so it forces the use of the left foot if desired.
The diagram below is set up so the attacker can score one of two ways. Either through the gate (orange cones in penalty area) to teach crossing or by scoring on the big goal. But you can set it up central or wide and just attack the big goal.
In the grand scheme of things, how we set up sessions matters as well. Is there a lot of down time in your session? That's okay if it's designed down time, where in certain parts of the season you allow more time for recovery, but too often I see downtime by default. Prepare ahead of time and structure your field set-up to reduce change over times—this just keeps your players motors running and helps keep their mental focus for sustained periods.
Rest is important during practice, but it goes hand in hand with working with the appropriate intensity for the appropriate amount of time. If the design of practice as a whole and individual activities is flawed then kids won't achieve match fitness. Instead of looking toward conditioning programs that older teens or even pros do to get young (read: sub U14s) players fit, lets look first at the activities we are doing.
Finally, when I go to coaching courses, even though the activities done seem simple, I make sure I jump in. I walk in the players' shoes, so to speak, so I get a feel for the flow and intensity of the. This more than anything convinced me that non-soccer conditioning for pre U16s is a dead end in most regards.
