Pre-Season Fitness for Grassroots Football: What to Do in the Six Weeks Before Kickoff

Pre-season is the least structured period in grassroots football. Most clubs run two or three sessions before the first league game, some of which are just fitness circuits and a squad discussion about last season. Players arrive at game one undertrained, and injuries cluster in the first four weeks of the season.

A six-week pre-season programme doesn't need to be complicated. It needs to be progressive.

Weeks 1–2: Base Fitness and Technical Refresh

Players are returning from summer with variable fitness levels. Don't start with high-intensity sessions. The objective is to rebuild the aerobic base and re-establish technical habits without injury risk.

Activities: long possession games (7v7 or 9v9, low intensity), ball mastery circuits, passing patterns at 60–70% pace. 45–60 minutes. No sprinting. No competitive small-sided games.

Weeks 3–4: Building Intensity

Introduce interval training with the ball. Sprint activation drills, 90-second high-intensity SSGs with rest periods, pressing drills at 80% intensity. The objective is to build the anaerobic fitness needed for match demands while maintaining the ball.

This is also the right point to introduce new tactical concepts for the season — players are physically present and mentally fresh, and there's no match pressure.

Weeks 5–6: Match Preparation

Friendly matches and full-speed training. Technical work at match pace, set piece rehearsal, competitive SSGs. This is not the time for new concepts — it's the time to consolidate what weeks 1–4 built.

If your club runs pre-season friendlies: treat them as training, not as matches to win. Rotate every player, try different positions, give younger players extended minutes. The information from a well-run friendly is more valuable than the result.

Injury Prevention: The Non-Negotiables

Dynamic warm-ups before every session — not static stretching. Static stretching before activity has been shown to temporarily reduce muscle strength and power; dynamic movement (high knees, lateral shuffles, leg swings) prepares the body without these effects.

Adequate rest between sessions. Adults and older youth need 48 hours between high-intensity sessions. Two back-to-back high-intensity sessions in a week during pre-season is the most common cause of early season injury in grassroots football.

Adjusting the six weeks for younger age groups

The structure above is written with adult and older youth teams in mind — for U10 and below, pre-season looks different: shorter sessions built around games rather than structured fitness blocks, since young players build aerobic base through play far more naturally than through dedicated conditioning work (see our pre-season framework guide). The six-week progression's underlying principle — start low-intensity and build — still applies, just delivered entirely through games rather than named "fitness" phases.

What to do if you're starting pre-season late

Not every squad gets a clean six weeks — sometimes the first session lands three or four weeks before the opener. Compressing the programme rather than skipping weeks 1-2 is the better trade-off: a shorter base phase followed by a shorter build phase still respects the underlying progression, whereas jumping straight to high-intensity work with an unconditioned squad is exactly the pattern that causes early-season injuries.

Players returning from a summer injury

A player carrying an injury into pre-season, or returning partway through after treatment over the summer, needs to be tracked separately from the group programme rather than folded straight back into wherever the squad has reached — following their own return-to-training progression (guided by whoever treated them) even if that means several sessions at reduced intensity while teammates move ahead. Rushing a returning player to "catch up" with the group's fitness level is one of the more common causes of a repeat injury early in the season.

Hydration and heat in early pre-season sessions

Pre-season often starts in the warmer weeks of late summer, and a squad that's been inactive over the break is less heat-adapted than they'll be a few weeks in — building in water breaks proactively during the first sessions, rather than waiting for players to ask, reduces the risk of players pushing through discomfort they'd otherwise mention. This matters more in weeks 1-2 specifically, before bodies have adjusted to regular training again.