What is the physical impact of a player training alone?

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As the transfer saga of the summer goes on, the player at the centre of it is left with one task: keep himself as fit as possible so that when a resolution is eventually found, he’s ready to go — no matter what shirt he’s wearing.

But there’s just one hitch. For the past month or so, Newcastle United’s Alexander Isak has been training alone.

Footballers are used to being part of a pack. They spend large parts of their time surrounded by team-mates, support staff and coaches. Training sessions are competitive and intense, designed to get the best out of players and prepare them for the heat of battle in the Premier League. When that scenario is taken away from them, it is bound to have an impact.

So, from a physical standpoint, what does that look like for a footballer who might spend weeks or even months training solo?

The first thing to note is that the FA has one key rule regarding how clubs have to treat players who are training alone. Whether that is because they are on the brink of a transfer elsewhere or for disciplinary reasons, they have to be provided with a first-team coach to train them each day.

It could be one of the fitness coaches as opposed to a football coach; it just has to be someone associated with the first team.

Clubs are not under any obligation to allow them to train at a particular time, though. It is not unheard of for a club that is keen to ease a player out to schedule their sessions at 5pm, so the rest of the team has been and gone. They might ban them from the dressing room and restaurant, too; tactics that are designed to make life as uncomfortable as possible for the player and force the move.

That is not the case for every player training solo. Some are players the club would much rather hang on to, if they could.

Southampton’s Tyler Dibling, who is close to joining Everton, has been training alone amid transfer speculation (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

One thing that is true for most players in the top flight now is that they have private support teams around them who keep them in shape even when they are not with their clubs. The days of footballers spending long summers on the beach losing their fitness are long gone. Now, they are more likely to be found working away in gyms and on training pitches around the world, ensuring they return to their clubs for pre-season in good shape.

Sometimes they might team up with other players for those off-season training blocks, but some will work solo, in a similar scenario to that of players who are made to train alone once a season is under way.

“We now live in a world where players are physically and physiologically fit when they report back for pre-season,” says sports scientist Chris Barnes, who has spent time working at Middlesbrough, West Bromwich Albion and Nottingham Forest and has been a consultant for UEFA for the past seven years.

“The purpose of pre-season, then, is to transition that physical fitness into football fitness with the introduction of the ball and working with their team-mates. Team training is very different to individual football training, which is very different to individual physical and physiological training.”

Bryan Mbeumo trained in the gym at Brentford before moving to Manchester United and performance scientist Andrew Wiseman considers there to be three subsections beneath the umbrella term of “fitness”: “You have ‘fitness’, you have ‘fitness but poorly conditioned’ and then you have ‘fit to play’,” he tells The Athletic.

“That means you can have general fitness — so you might be able to run 5k in a decent time but that doesn’t mean it’s applicable to the game. Then you get that other level of fitness (that is applicable), but you can’t really execute the skills of the game. Then you get the fit to compete, which is where you want your players to be.”

Wiseman was working for NWSL team Utah Royals during the first Covid lockdown in 2020 and says the challenge of building a training programme for players to do individually that replicates game demands is one that a lot of people discovered during the pandemic. “It certainly made me rethink my individual conditioning of players,” he says.

One of the hardest areas to replicate, says Wiseman, is accelerations and decelerations.

“A player might cover 50 or 60 accelerations and decelerations in a game,” he says. “Across a training week, that might be 100-150, depending on how people train. Somehow you’ve got to keep that up (when training alone), but it’s really difficult.”

The deceleration component is particularly challenging, he explains. “Ideally, you want them to stop fast, turn quickly, but that can be really difficult without team training.”

The drills that are harder on the body are the ones that are executed at a higher velocity, says Wiseman.

“That might be over 3m/s2. You have to design drills that are going to try to get that within the context of that player and their game. If it’s a wing-back, you can do drills where you work on their high-speed running or sprint distance and put in accelerations and decelerations at the end. But if you’ve got a forward who presses quite a lot, it might shift your focus slightly in terms of what you’re working on.”

Given that the 2025-26 season is now under way, the challenge for any player who is working solo is the speed of the transition (when it comes) from individual training into team training and match play — whether that is as part of a new team or after being welcomed back into the fold of their employer. In the former scenario, the pressure is immediately on because everybody wants to have a look at the new signing.

But if that transition from training on their own to training and playing with the team isn’t appropriately managed — i.e. they’re thrown straight in — then in certain circumstances that can raise red flags, says Barnes.

Why? What exactly is it that they are missing when training solo, even under the guidance of a first-team coach?

“When you’re working on your own, the majority of work you’re doing will be almost coded and pre-determined when it comes to movement patterns and skills, which is good and really useful,” says Barnes. “But what it doesn’t give you is what’s going on in an environment where you’ve got multiple players trying to play in a system.

Barnes has worked for several clubs in football (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)

“The amount of information you’re receiving and having to take on board then is much greater. A lot of what you’re doing in the team environment is reacting off that, and reactive movement patterns can often be very different.”

Clubs need to have the confidence to hold these players back, just briefly, from what everybody wants, which is to see them in the shirt, playing in competitive games.

Wiseman compares the situation of a player training alone to that of a player returning from injury. In the latter scenario, he says a player would progress from isolated conditioning — which focuses on specific physical components like speed, agility or strength, often in a drill format, without direct relation to game situations — to integrated conditioning, which combines physical training with technical and tactical elements, often in game-like situations i.e. small-sided games or drills with tactical constraints.

For a player training alone, not for rehab purposes, he says, “a blend of the isolated and integrated is quite good to follow. You don’t want soft tissue injuries in training, so you have to be able to prepare them, which means understanding what the player needs to be exposed to.”

Injury risk is something Barnes says increases with any form of transition. “When you join a new club, when a new coach joins your club — all these things are a period of transition and each period of transition does elevate injury risk. That’s why it’s so important that that transition is managed.”

What does it look like, in fitness terms, when a player who has been training individually finally finds their way into a team?

Wiseman says it’s about “sharpness”. “There’s ‘fit’ and ‘match-fit’. Also, the physical demands on a player change based on the playing formation and style. For example, if Isak is going to be played as a target No 9 in a 4-2-3-1, the demands on him will be a lot different to if he plays in a 4-3-3.

Barnes looks specifically at the physical response of the player during that transition, and the relationship between the work they are doing and how they respond to that physically and physiologically.

“The way we measure the response, generally speaking, is through heart-rate measurements,” he says. “At the point of introduction to working with a squad again, their heart-rate response will reflect all this additional stress and will be higher.

“If the player is with a new club, they’re going to be keen to impress their new team-mates and their coach — and that’s another contributor to this stress, which will mean that the internal cost of the amount of work they’re doing is increased.

“Over a period of time — not long, maybe a week or 10 days — it will settle down and an equilibrium will be established. For the same amount of work, they will become more efficient and have a lower heart-rate response.

“It’s this relationship between what we call the external load (the work they’re doing) and the internal load, which is the body’s response.”

Training solo can only take players so far, then. Whatever the next step is for them — whether that is back into the fold of their team or into a new one — there will be gaps in their preparation that can only be filled when they are back training and playing with a team.

(Top photo: Isak has been training away from Eddie Howe’s squad. Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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