A soccer training schedule for individual players

Start with practice and game day

For a soccer player, the fixed points are obvious: team practice during the week and a game on the weekend. Lay them out first. Everything else, your individual sessions, gets planned into the windows that remain.

Plan the individual work that moves you forward

Team practice can’t cover everything you personally need. Ball mastery, finishing, first touch, speed and strength are often down to the extra work you do alone. Slot those sessions into the open days, each tied to a skill you’re building, so every week moves something forward.

Respect game day

A hard session the day before a game, or a heavy one the day after, blunts both. Mark the days around game day and keep them lighter. Seeing the whole week makes this simple.

An example soccer training schedule for a week

Here is what a weekly soccer training schedule can look like for a youth club player: school five days a week, two team practices, one weekend game, and individual work planned onto the calmer days. It’s a template, not a prescription — your practice nights may fall differently, and it’s the shape of the week that matters, not the exact days.

The logic: Thursday carries the harder practice because Wednesday’s rest sets it up and there’s still a buffer before Saturday. Friday’s session is deliberately easy — touches and mobility on the field or in the yard, nothing that leaves fatigue in Saturday’s legs. The two rest days are planned, not leftover. A player with three practices a week would drop one individual session, not a rest day.

An individual soccer training plan that fits around practice

A sensible individual soccer training plan is small and specific: one or two sessions a week, 30–60 minutes each, on days without practice. The mistake most players make is doing “extra training” in general — more running, more of everything. Tie each session to one skill instead: this month first touch under pressure, next month finishing off both feet. You need a ball, a wall or a small goal, and a plan — not a full field.

Then let the plan flex. After a hard practice week, the individual session shrinks or goes; after a bye week, it can grow. That’s the point of planning the whole week in one place: the extra work stays extra, instead of quietly becoming overload. Progressure tracks which skills your sessions feed, so you can see the work adding up.

When the week changes: tournaments, doubleheaders, exams

Youth soccer in the US comes with tournament weekends and the occasional doubleheader — two or three games in two days. The week after one of those starts as a recovery week: skip the Monday individual session, keep the first practice light if your coach allows, and hold on to the rest days. Development doesn’t pause in a congested stretch — it moves into the games.

Exam weeks flip the other way: your legs are fresh but your head is full, and school fatigue is real load. Keep the team practices — the structure helps — and drop the individual sessions first. They come back the week after finals. Seeing school and soccer in the same weekly plan turns this into a decision instead of a collision.

How much extra training by age group

Roughly U13–U15: one, at most two, short individual sessions on top of team practice. These are growth years — load climbs fast, and quality touches beat volume. Roughly U16–U19: two individual sessions is a sensible norm, three only in an otherwise calm week, and strength work starts to earn its place. At every age, keep at least one full rest day, and keep the weekly total sensible. If you’re tempted to copy pro-level volume, read how professional players structure their training week first — they train less, and recover more, than most people assume.

Keep the soccer load sensible

Between school soccer, a club team and individual training, a young player’s load adds up fast. Progressure sums every session across the week so the total stays honest, and lays out team practice and games as the scaffold you plan around.