Training Alone: Making the Best of a Quiet Season
There’s a strange kind of discipline required when the usual structure disappears. No team session to show up for, no coach shouting instructions, just you, some open space, and whatever motivation you can scrape together on a Tuesday afternoon. A lot of players found themselves in exactly that position, and plenty discovered things about their own game they’d never had time to notice before, mostly because the usual noise of team training had always drowned it out.
Rediscovering the basics
Without a match to prepare for, some players went back to fundamentals they hadn’t touched since childhood. Juggling a ball in the garden, working on weaker foot control against a wall, running through footwork drills with nobody watching. It sounds almost too simple, but stripped of the pressure of performance, a lot of people found real joy in just getting better at the small stuff, the kind of practice that usually gets skipped once matches and results take over the calendar.
The mental side nobody talks about
Training solo tests patience in a way team sport rarely does. There’s no shared energy to borrow when motivation dips, no teammate to make you laugh through a tough set. Athletes who managed it well leaned on routine, treating solo sessions with the same seriousness as a scheduled match, even when the only spectator was a garden fence and the only applause came from a neighbour’s dog barking at the wrong moment.
What carries forward
Plenty of the habits built during quieter, isolated training stuck around once normal life resumed. A renewed appreciation for basic technique, a habit of self motivated practice, and for some, a reminder that the sport was something they loved doing regardless of who was watching. Sometimes it takes losing the usual setup to notice what actually kept you coming back, and plenty of players say that quiet stretch taught them more about their own motivation than years of regular fixtures ever did.
A common mistake worth flagging
One trap a lot of solo trainers fell into was overcompensating, cramming in far more sessions than any coach would ever have scheduled, simply because there was nothing else filling the time. Without a match at the weekend to build toward, some players trained until they were exhausted rather than pacing themselves sensibly, and ended up more fatigued and demotivated than if they’d stuck to a normal, lighter routine. The players who fared best treated their solo sessions the same way a sensible coach would, structured, varied, with proper rest built in, rather than mistaking sheer volume for progress.
Still deciding where to go next? Our guide to The Unsexy Habits Behind Every Fit Athlete might help.
For more inspiration, take a look at our guide to The Myths Amateur Players Still Believe About Fitness.
