Many new to soccer coaches believe that developing your unique and completely own practice plans is something difficult and advanced. However, I can ensure that this is a piece of cake if you just use your fantasy and little creativity.

To get things right, I don’t mean that you should create a practice plan completely from scratch. Instead, you should use some already created practice plans and then modify them for you own use.The ideal soccer practice plans should consist of 5 parts:

Warm-up Part

This will be the most essential part of your soccer plan and is a must no matter what type of plan you are developing.

The warm up part should generally only involve jogging and stretching exercises. However, you may also involve ball drills but these should not be physically demanding.

One popular warm-up drill is to let your players juggle with different parts of their bodies. The warm up session could be anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes depending on the age of your players, the level of competition and so on.

Individual Part

These activities involve all players and they should all have an own ball. In this part of practice your players should focus mainly on dribbling, passing, heading and so on.

The purpose is to develop your players overall ball control. I recommend you to involve at least two individual drills per session.

The Small Group Part

In this part of the practice plan you should try to involve drills that require small groups (possibly 2-3 players per group). The focus should be put on developing your players communication on the field.

The main concept of small group activities is to help and monitor the weaker players and making sure that they are properly supports. This builds up a team concept.

Fitness Part

In the fitness part of your practice you should mainly focus on drills without involving the ball. You could for example instruct your players to perform sit-ups, push-ups, knee jumps, sprints and so on.

This part of your training session could be anywhere from 5-15 minutes. I know by experience that players hate this part but it is something that needs to be done for their own best.

Cooling Down

This is the last part of your practice and is aimed for cooling down your players. This part should consist of jogging (5-10 minutes) followed by stretching (10-15 minutes).

I know by experience that many players like to cheat during this part (especially while stretching). You should therefore keep an eye on your players as this part is really important and needs to be performed with 100 % concentration.

Summary

So, to create a practice plan you simply need to pick 1-2 drills for each of these parts and then adapt these drills during the practice. Each drill should vary for 5-10 minutes.

So for example let’s say you have 10 drills and average 7.5 minutes for every drill. This will give you 75 min. Add also 15 min for rest, setting up the drills etc and you have about 90 minutes which is more than enough for a regular soccer practice.

If you have not yet visited our soccer tactics section I suggest you do so as you will find more interesting ideas you can use!