November 2, 2026

Training at home with no field, no net and no gym

A wall, a ball and about two metres of floor is enough for a real session. Here is what to do in a garage, a hallway or a patch of grass the size of a car.

A wall and about two metres of floor is enough. Not a compromise version — enough. Most of what improves a young athlete is repetition of small technical movements and control of their own bodyweight, and neither of those needs a pitch.

The space problem is real, though, and "do some training at home" is useless advice to a family in a flat in November. So here is the specific version.

The wall is the best equipment you own

A wall gives you an opponent that never gets bored, always returns the ball, and does it slightly wrong so they have to adjust.

Passing against a wall, one touch and then two. Receiving across the body. Throwing and catching. Volleyball setting and passing straight up and off the wall. Soft-hand ball-handling drills for basketball. A tennis ball against a wall is a reaction drill for almost any sport.

A hundred wall repetitions in ten minutes is more touches than most kids get in a team session, where the ball is shared between fifteen of them.

Two cautions: use a softer ball indoors than you think you need, and agree on the wall in advance with whoever owns it.

What fits in a very small space

Floor work. Squats, glute bridges, planks, dead bugs, push-ups, calf hops, single-leg balance. All of it fits on a towel. This is the strength block, and it is the same one the app gives everybody — there is no external load in any of it, for the reasons in should a young athlete lift weights.

Footwork. A ladder drawn in chalk, or just two shoes as markers. Quick feet in and out, lateral shuffles, split steps. Change of direction in a metre and a half is genuinely useful, because the deceleration is the hard part and that happens in the first step.

Close control. Toe taps on the ball, sole rolls, figure-of-eight between the feet, juggling from the hands. A ball and a square metre.

Jumping and landing. Broad jumps need a couple of metres; vertical jumps and — more importantly — landing practice need almost nothing. Jump, land soft, hold it for a second. Watch the knees.

What genuinely needs space, and the substitute

Sprinting needs distance, and there is no indoor version of a 30-metre run. The substitute is not another sprint drill — it is accepting that conditioning can go somewhere else in the week, outdoors or at practice, and using the indoor time for the things the indoor space is good at.

Shooting at a goal or a basket needs a target. Form shooting close in, against a wall or into a net or just to a partner, keeps the mechanics alive even when the distance is not available.

Long passing needs a garden. Nothing to be done about that in a hallway, and pretending otherwise is how a drill becomes a broken lamp.

A ten-minute indoor session that is actually a session

Three minutes of movement to warm up — on the spot is fine, and there is a version with no jumping if you have downstairs neighbours. Movement first, not stretching, for the reasons in static stretching is the wrong warm-up.

Four minutes of wall work or close control, while they are fresh.

Two minutes of floor strength: two sets of squats, a plank, glute bridges.

One minute of something hard — mountain climbers, fast feet, squat jumps if the floor allows.

Stretch what got used.

That is a real session. It is the same shape as the twenty-five minute version, which is the point: the structure is what makes it work, not the square metres.

What the app does about space

You tell it the sport; it does not ask about your garden, because a drill list that assumes a full-size goal is a drill list a lot of families cannot use.

The sessions are built around a ball, a wall, a few steps of space and occasionally a couple of markers you can improvise. Anything needing more than that is the exception rather than the default, and there is always something to do instead.

Winter is the hard part of the year for this. It is also the part where the families who keep going pull ahead of the ones who wait for spring.