Touch Football Training
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Touch Football Training
The core components of a touch football training program are physical performance, skills exercises, and strength and conditioning.
The fitness demands of touch football are agility, speed, speed endurance, aerobic endurance, strength, power and flexibility. Touch football is considered a predominately an anaerobic sport, however an aerobic base is required to recover from the anaerobic efforts. Traditional touch football training programs involve the initial establishment of an aerobic base followed by exhausting and (often) painful endurance programs leading then to specific match conditioning refinements for speed. Endurance drills are regularly performed at a lower intensity and tend to rely on greater contributions from the aerobic system. Many training programs consist of repetitions of lengthy, if not longer sprinting distances, in an effort to achieve game endurance. Players often work on sharp, short movements to simulate game play. Touch football is also very technical and strategic and elite players must learn a number of different attacking plays and defensive patterns.
Touch football specific drills deal mainly with ball handling, catching, running, passing and dumping.
Even though there is only limited contact in touch football, injuries do occur often. Proper training can significantly reduce the likelihood of injury.
Touch football training programs generally involve high intensity exercises dispersed with low intensity exercises, also known as interval training. This enables players to get used to bursts of high intensity activity followed by an active recovery period.
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Characteristics of Touch Football
The games consist of two teams with 6 on field players each. However, some recreational and school competitions allow for 7 players. Each team is usually split into 3 different positions. These are the wings, links, and middles.
The game of Touch football involves short bursts of acceleration in attack generally ranging from 2 – 20 metres. These patterns include shuffling, stepping, changing direction all of which require agility while maintaining good body position.
A defensive Touch football player is required to make short movements of less than 5 metres involving shuffling, jogging and backwards running.
Both general and specific playing skills are often undertaken while moving in relation to the playing field. Skills such as catching, passing, dumping, sidestepping, swerving and making touches are all usually performed while some movement across the ground, in various combinations of forward / backward and lateral, within the field confines occurs. Even the dump skill, which has evolved from the stationery rollball, is performed while a player is moving, sometimes close to three-quarters of maximal speed. Movement to position or re-position without possession of the ball, is a prime example of game movement activity, especially for defending players and what is often overlooked, also for attacking players.
Touch football involves short near maximum efforts of varying speeds for periods of 2-3 minutes. These are broken down into about 50% anaerobic, 30% aerobic and a 20% combination of the two. Athletes reach 75% of their maximum heart rates on average for the duration of a game. On average, 90% of the game involves low to moderate activity with the rest being high intensity. An elite player covers about 3.1 kilometres a game.
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Professional Touch Football
Touch football is a popular limited contact sport that began in Australia. It’s now expanding to other parts of the world such as the United Kingdom and the Pacific, and has its own World Cup and other international competitions. The sport originates from rugby league, but instead of tackling the opponent, players simply have to touch them. It’s popular with males and females of various ages. Australia has several male and female teams in a variety of age groups as well as a National Touch League, which was founded in 1997.
