Preseason in youth and amateur football: injury-free and with controlled load

How many weeks, how to raise the load without jumps, what the evidence says about the Nordic hamstring exercise and FIFA 11+, and how to monitor your team with perceived exertion times minutes. Includes a 4 to 6 week outline and a checklist.

Linkalde · 2026-10-31

August arrives and the team comes back from holidays after three months with almost no ball work. The temptation is the usual one: run a lot in the first weeks “to build a base”. It is exactly the opposite of what the evidence asks for. Preseason is a delicate moment of the year, and almost always for the same reason: raising the load too fast, or in the same way for everyone.

In Swedish elite football, a study of the 14 top-division teams found that the risk of injury in training was significantly higher in preseason than during the competitive season, and the same went for overuse injuries and reinjuries. It is not youth football data, but the logic carries over: players return to training detrained and with a lot of volume in a few days. And a Spanish study with a semi-professional team, measured with GPS, concludes that the volume and intensity of the first and last weeks of preseason deserve special care.

This article gives you a practical way to plan it: what to look for by age, how many weeks, how to raise the load, what science says (and does not say) about injury prevention, and how to monitor everything with a sheet of paper and a stopwatch.

What to aim for in preseason by age

An honest warning before we start: there is no study that says how many weeks or exactly which contents a U10 or a U18 player needs. What follows is planning judgment, based on the load principles explained below, not a validated protocol.

The reason for shortening preseason the younger the players are is simple: children do not detrain in summer like an adult, and what they need is to play. With youth and amateur players, who can indeed arrive detrained, more margin is needed to raise the load without jumps.

How to raise the load without jumps

The weekly 10 % limit

The most cited reference is Tim Gabbett, who reviewed the relationship between load and injury in team sports. According to his review, weeks in which the load changed between 5 % lower and 10 % higher than the previous one were associated with less than 10 % injury risk, whereas increases of 15 % or more raised that risk to a range of 21 % to 49 %. He himself recommends not exceeding a 10 % increase, but warns that those data were unpublished and from a specific context, so they are guidance and not a law.

There is a practical problem: in preseason you start from a very low load, and raising it only 10 % each week would take you many weeks to reach competition level. The reasonable way out is to start the first week with a load that is truly manageable (what the player did in summer, not what he does in November) and then spread the increases, with a deload week every three or four. This is our own criterion, not a study result.

Acute and chronic load (ACWR)

The most popular index for monitoring this is the ratio between acute and chronic load. The acute load is that of the last week; the chronic load, the rolling average of the previous three to six weeks (four in many studies). Dividing one by the other tells you whether this week is a jump compared with what the body has been doing. Gabbett proposed a “safe zone” between 0.8 and 1.3 and a “danger zone” from 1.5 upwards.

The criticisms of the ACWR are serious. In a 2020 article in the Journal of Athletic Training, Impellizzeri and colleagues show that the ratio is an ambiguous metric: in a simulation of 1,000 seasons where it had no real effect, it still appeared associated with injuries, and the association disappeared when the training schedule was modelled. Moreover, the U-shaped “safe zone” is not seen in the original studies, and the same data gave acute loads between 1,340 and 3,450 units depending on how it was calculated. Their recommendation to practitioners: expert judgment and classic training principles. In a youth club, the ratio works as an alarm (if it comes out above 1.5, look at what happened that week), not as a traffic light that decides on its own.

Monotony and strain

There are two concepts from Carl Foster that are calculated with the same sheet and are very useful in preseason, when there is a tendency to repeat identical sessions. Monotony is the average daily load of the week divided by its standard deviation: if every day weighs the same, monotony is high. Strain is the weekly load multiplied by monotony. A high load with little variation has been linked to overtraining risk, and high strain tends to occur in preparatory periods without regular competition. A simple trick: alternate a hard day, an easy one and a medium one, instead of three sessions of the same weight.

The International Olympic Committee consensus (2016) agrees on the essentials: poor load management is a first-order injury risk factor, and it offers guidelines both for prescribing the load and for monitoring it, together with the athlete’s well-being.

Intensity: running or small-sided games?

The classic image of preseason is laps around the pitch. The evidence says they are not essential. In a trial with 40 youth players, one group did running intervals and another did intervals in small-sided games with the ball: 4 blocks of 4 minutes at 90 to 95 % of maximum heart rate with 3 minutes of active recovery, twice a week. Both groups improved their aerobic capacity and match performance, mostly in the first 4 weeks of preseason, and there were no significant differences between them.

The systematic review by Hill-Haas and colleagues adds the how: the intensity of a small-sided game rises the fewer players there are and the more space each one has, constant coach encouragement increases it, and most rule changes barely matter. Small-sided games can match or exceed match intensity. In return, they vary more than continuous running, so it pays to measure what load each player really had.

• Weeks 1 and 2: possession games and 7 v 7 or larger matches, with lots of space and long recoveries. The ball sets the intensity, not the clock.
• Weeks 3 and 4: 4 v 4 and 3 v 3 formats in blocks of 3 to 4 minutes, with active rests of similar length.
• From week 4 (youth and amateur): one high-intensity block per week, no more. The rest of the sessions below that intensity.

This is our own guideline, not a study protocol. What the evidence does support is the underlying idea: you can train endurance with the ball and get the same as by running, while also giving players technical and tactical work.

Injury prevention: what works and what is known

The Nordic hamstring exercise

The Nordic exercise consists of kneeling with the ankles held and letting yourself fall forward, braking with the hamstrings. It is the most studied for preventing the most frequent muscle injury in football. In a randomized trial with 942 Danish players from 50 professional and amateur teams, the group that added a 10-week eccentric programme and then a weekly one during the season suffered 15 acute hamstring injuries versus 52 in the control group (adjusted relative risk 0.29). To prevent one injury, 13 players had to be trained; to prevent one recurrence, only 3.

The largest review, by van Dyk and colleagues in 2019, pooled 15 studies with 8,459 athletes and found a relative risk of 0.49 (almost half the injuries) in programmes that include the Nordic exercise. With randomized trials only, the value was 0.52.

Important nuance: the Nordic exercise was not always done alone, it was often part of broader programmes, so we cannot say how much it contributes by itself; and data on minors are scarcer than on adults. In youth categories, introduce it with few sets and few repetitions, build up slowly (soreness can be strong if you overdo it) and start from the U14 to U15 stage. That dosage is our own estimate, not a protocol from the literature.

FIFA 11+: a warm-up that reduces injuries

The 11+ is a warm-up routine of about 20 minutes combining running, strength, balance and jumping. The original trial, with 1,892 players aged 13 to 17 in 125 Norwegian clubs, did not reach significance on its primary outcome (lower-limb injuries, relative risk 0.71, confidence interval 0.49 to 1.03). It did on the secondary outcomes: 32 % fewer injuries overall, 53 % fewer overuse injuries and 45 % fewer severe injuries. It should be said as it is: good evidence, not perfect.

For the youngest there is the 11+ Kids. A 2022 meta-analysis of 6 studies and 10,565 children aged 7 to 14 found clear reductions. It is the best data available for youth football:

Replacing your warm-up with the 11+ costs no extra minutes, because you already warm up. Do it from the first day of preseason so that it is a habit in August and not a novelty in October.

Five planning mistakes that keep repeating

1. Fitness work without the ball. In the youth trial, small-sided games matched running intervals. Running without the ball does not give you more aerobic capacity and takes away time from technique and tactics, which is what the team needs in September.
2. Copying a professional team’s programme. Those programmes have more weeks, more sessions and a staff that controls the load with GPS, and many preseason injury studies come from professionals. Adapt the principle (progress, deload, monitor), not the volume.
3. The same load for everyone. Not everyone arrives in the same state: whoever played in summer, whoever was on holiday, whoever is coming back from injury or whoever is in the middle of a growth spurt. Have at least three load groups (normal, reduced and return) and move players between them.
4. Leaving tactics for the end. It is common to spend all of August “doing fitness” and to start working on the game model two weeks before the league. Put the team’s ideas into small-sided games from the first week: the physical work stays the same.
5. Not measuring anything. Without data there is no way to know whether week 3 was a jump. The minutes of each session, one perceived exertion number per player and four well-being questions are enough. It costs two minutes per session and is explained in the last section.

One more risk, tied to the calendar: friendlies. The Spanish GPS study cited earlier showed that the number and distribution of matches shape the whole planning, and that accumulated fatigue can harm performance at the start of the season. Do not cram several friendlies into the last week: it is a lot of extra load on top of training.

Outline of 4 to 6 weeks

This is a proposal for a team that trains three days a week and plays friendlies at the end. The minutes and the exertion (scale from 0 to 10, explained in the next section) are indicative, and the idea is that no week rises much more than 10 % over the previous one, except the first, which is for readaptation. It is our own proposal, not a validated programme.

A reassuring detail: in the youth trial, most of the aerobic improvement came in the first 4 weeks. If your preseason is short, nothing essential is missing: the bulk of the adaptation comes early and the following weeks serve mostly to consolidate and fine-tune.

Monitoring with simple tools

Perceived exertion times minutes (RPE x minutes)

At the end of the session (about 10 to 30 minutes later, so that it is not weighed down by the last exercise alone), each player tells you how hard the whole session was on a scale from 0 (rest) to 10 (maximal). You multiply that number by the minutes of the session and get the load in arbitrary units. Example from a review: an 87-minute session with exertion 4 gives 348 units.

The method was evaluated in football in a study with 19 young players with a mean age of 17.6 and 479 sessions: perceived exertion correlated significantly with the load calculated with a heart rate monitor (correlations of 0.50 to 0.85), and the authors consider it a good indicator of overall internal load, without expensive equipment. With small children, a scale with faces or colours usually works better than numbers (our criterion).

With those numbers you calculate each week:

• Weekly load: the sum of the session loads of that player (and the team average).
• Change versus the previous week: if it clearly exceeds 10 %, ask why. If the next week is a deload, fine.
• Acute/chronic ratio: this week’s load divided by the average of the last four. Use it as an alarm if it goes above 1.5. In preseason the chronic average is low and the ratio comes out high: interpret it calmly.
• Monotony: the weekly daily average divided by its standard deviation. If it rises a lot, mix hard days with easy ones.

A nuance any coach recognizes: what you thought you were asking for and what the player feels it cost him often do not match. That is exactly what you want to see.

Well-being questionnaire

Four questions before training, from 1 to 5: how I slept, how much fatigue I have, how much soreness or muscle pain I have and how my mood is. It is filled in within a minute, on paper or in the messaging group. The systematic review by Saw and colleagues concludes that subjective measures reflect acute and chronic load with more sensitivity and consistency than objective ones, and that they can be used alone or combined with others. They do not replace looking at the player, but they help detect the one who arrives in a bad state before he gets hurt.

Practical rule (ours): for anyone who reports 4 or 5 for fatigue or soreness two days in a row, lower the load for that session and ask him. Without drama, and without the boy feeling punished for being honest.

Preseason checklist

• Start date and first matchday fixed. Weeks counted backwards, with a deload week every three or four.
• A file for each player with previous injuries, allergies and an up-to-date medical check.
• Week 1 with a load that each player can truly handle, not the November one.
• Weekly load increase controlled, with no clear jumps of more than 10 % except in the initial readaptation.
• Every session with a clear intention and a planned intensity (from 0 to 10).
• Small-sided games as the basis of endurance work. Continuous running only as a complement.
• FIFA 11+ (or 11+ Kids) as the warm-up from day one.
• Nordic exercise for U14 to U15, youth and amateur players, with few sets at the start and a weekly reminder afterwards.
• The team’s tactical ideas present from the first week, inside the games.
• Three load groups (normal, reduced, return) and a weekly review of who is in each.
• Perceived exertion times minutes recorded in every session and a well-being questionnaire before training.
• Friendlies spread out, never several in the last week, and with minutes controlled per player.
• Heat: sessions first or last thing in the day, water always available and breaks in the shade.
• The week before the league with low load, set pieces and rest.

Preseason does not win the league, but it can complicate it: a key player injured in September costs more than any aerobic gain. Planning calmly, measuring the basics and training with the ball is the safest combination we have.