Handball
A handball training plan for your team
A build-up across the season, and a worked session for every training night with drills, timings and coaching points.
Handball has a lot of actions per minute and not much time. In seventy-five minutes you want to work on the overhead throw, on build-up play with the circle runner in it, on a defence that actually shifts, and you want small-sided games because that is where most of it sticks. All four do not fit. Which one you drop this week is the question a coach is chewing on at four in the afternoon.
With youth teams there is a second thing: conditioning belongs inside the game. A continuous three-a-side with a sensible work-to-rest ratio does more than a block of running, and the players prefer it. That is built into the library here. Separate physical blocks only appear for the oldest age groups, and even then with a ball.
What you get is the order. What each week is about, and what that means for Thursday.
How a handball week runs
01
Two sessions and a Saturday match is the rhythm most teams are on.
02
The session furthest from the match takes the hard work and anything new: drilling the defence, a new crossing move, the long game.
03
The last session before the match gets shorter and sharper. Finishing from the wing and from the circle, and nothing new that will not hold up on Saturday.
What a drill looks like
One of 92 handball drills, written for the middle age group. The text you see here is the text that lands on your session sheet.
Three wave fast break
18 to 25 minutes
Keep the counterattack going through all three waves when the first wave is stopped.
- Setup
- Wings start at 1, trailers at 2. A goalkeeper in each goal. Twelve play. Extras wait outside the sidelines at halfway and return used balls.
- How it runs
- 1. 3 blocks of 5 to 6 min, 2 min rest. Sequences run 25 to 35 s. 2. Wave 1: the keeper releases within 3 s to the wing at 1; shoot within 6 s. 3. Wave 2: two trailers from 2 and two defenders join, 3 against 3, 8 seconds. 4. Wave 3: 5 against 5; the defence organises only past halfway. Arm up at 15 s, four passes. 5. The outlet alternates sides; keepers change every block; a waiting player swaps in each sequence.
- What to watch
- Trailers run before they know whether wave 1 scored.
- Wave 2 attacks the space beside the first defender.
- Wave 3 plays immediately: no reset, no walk-in.
- What usually goes wrong
- The sequence dies at the first save → keep counting; nobody stops.
- Trailers running behind the ball down the middle → send them wide.
- Kit
- 10 × ball, 2 × goal, 10 × cone, 8 × bib
- Waiting players stand outside the sidelines, never behind a goal.
- End blocks on time; stop a player who lands repeatedly on one leg.
Where this fits in
There is no shortage of handball drills. Collections, PDFs, clips: if you want something for the overhead throw you will have it inside ten minutes.
What that does not give you is a season. Which drill belongs in week seven, and why that differs from week seventeen, is a different question and a different kind of product. This is that other product, with drills we wrote ourselves.
Rules, ages and limits
The rules, age categories and load limits behind the plan are the Dutch ones for now, because that is the competition structure we have built out. The drills themselves are not country-specific: a four-a-side overload game works the same anywhere, so a second country means rebuilding the rules and reusing the library. If you coach outside the Netherlands, the age bands are the part that will not match.
See whether it fits your group
A few questions about your team, and you have a season in front of you that you can read straight through.
Set up your team