During school holidays, that figure would have been at least the same or more. There were times where that 15 hours would have been accumulated over two or three days. These hours would have been less intense at times, with my brother and I mostly taking turns shooting at each other outside of time where we had enough company to play games. The hours of play during term time were more exclusively for game-play.
Does this sound like your childhood?
Whether you are a coach or a parent of a young player, it is worth considering how much do they play per week?
Speaking with Jay Cochrane - elite academy coach and head of residential summer football set-up www.soccerschooluk.co.uk – I got an elite take on player contact hours, their benefits and costs.
“Within a professional academy environment we have around 10 hours of contact time with most of our young players per week, including game time. In weeks when we play two games, sometimes training sessions are cancelled to give extra rest or at least training is made very light. Training is planned to factor in lighter and heavier physically demanding periods, to get a good balance of training stimulus and regeneration during which gains are consolidated. I would say overuse in the forms of overtraining and overplaying is one of the major factors in injury of youth players. Paying attention to training and playing volumes and intensities can be the difference between giving a young player a great opportunity to improve and risking their health and having them miss valuable development opportunities. Even within my summer week-long residential programme, planning of activities to minimise the risk of overuse is paramount.”
Where injuries cannot always be avoided, their risks can be minimised by reducing playing and training time to a minimal level to get a good return on time invested while also minimising odds of overuse. More doesn't always equal better, especially where motor skill development and overuse injuries are concerned.
The following two points may also be worth considering. The risks of training too little are much less severe than those of training too much. Injuries can take months, years and even more from players. Too much is never worth it. Also, when considering reducing
playing time, look at your temptation to remove recreational playing time versus organised playing and training time. You can be sure that organised playing and training time is extremely beneficial, especially for players wanting to make higher levels of the game but much like physical strengthening occurring during rest, game development can flourish during non-organised play time sometimes more than in organised time.
Children are resilient footballers. Don't play them so much that you test this valuable property of theirs. The risks are not worth it.
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Arton of Float Sting works with professional athletes of all kinds. Check out his summer course for coaches and those interested in better learning for sports at Float Sting
IS YOUR CHILD OVERDOING IT?
ARTON BALECI
How much football did you play as a child? I remember at secondary school playing for 20 minutes at morning break, around 50 minutes at lunch time and then anything from one to three hours after school, sometimes with a competitive 5-a-side or 11-a-side match thrown into the mix. Over a regular school week, I probably averaged out something like 15 hours of playing.