Uefa referee fitness exercise

A Uefa referee fitness exercise: what does that look like? I’ve found an exercise online that was created for Uefa referees by Werner Helsen and shared by other national associations. It focuses on speed and has a long sprint in it. Curious about it? I’ll explain in the video below.

Explanation of the Uefa referee fitness exercise

The Uefa referee fitness exercise is quite intense. I didn’t have a game, so made this part of my own training schedule. In the first few runs I thought: this goes well so far, but after 4 of the 6 runs I really felt the change of direction after a sprint. Great exercise to work on your speed.

Below the video you’ll see the text.

Text version of the exercise

• You start almost in the corner of the field of play, in line with the goal-area line.
• You go sideways towards the edge of the penalty area
• Jog to a cone just over the halfway line
• Move backwards until you pass the line of the circle
• From there a sprint at high speed to the goal-area line
• Turn and sprint back immediately back towards the circle
• Now you’ll mirror what you did before the sprints
• Backwards again to the cone just over the halfway line
• Jog towards the other edge of the penalty area
• Finish sideways to a cone near the corner
• You walk back towards the start

This exercises takes 2 minutes, including the walk. The Uefa referee fitness exercise is repeated 6 times. Because you need some rest then, you take 4 minutes off. And then another series like this. In total it takes 28 minutes, plus some rest after the 2nd series.

Of course: do a good warm-up before this exercise and cool down after it. If you want to train for 1 hour, you can add another exercise before this where you already do some sprints and make your body ready for this intense exercise described above.

Another speed endurance exercise

Want to see more exercises? I’ll publish them both in Instagram TV and on my YouTube channel.