Soccer Practice Drills

It’s not necessary that you agree, but you should listen to this. While coaching players on games that involves great strength, and, or explosive power weight training soccer is very useful. For player who do not require strength and power that much can also take advantage of strong abdominal and lower back muscles.

This article explains the basic principles of weight training for soccer using common activities for demonstrating those principles.

One of the key principles of soccer strength training is, Specificity. The concept of this is to coach the players to put more time in working out in a way resembling their play on the field. Like running is a good drill for runners and swimming for swimmers.

To improve power, speed is an important aspect in training. The role of players in team sports, their age, physical and mental capacity to take stress and their player’s level must be considered when coaching them in weight training programs.

Soccer Fitness

All this information is useful for a trainer in designing a fitness training program, to make a good start.

Physical conditioning usually requires activities that improve specific training. You see workouts like running and weight exercises are also performed by swimmers to enhance their aerobic and strength and power fitness.

One more feature in weight training soccer often ignored is prevention of injury.Another area of weight training soccer which is commonly neglected in is injury prevention. Although it does not contribute directly to an increase in a player’s performance, injury prevention can positively support a player’s performance by ensuring that he or she is fit to play at crucial times in the event calendar.

Running, sprinting, turning and twisting, side-stepping, and getting ready for a shot are all the exercises performed in soccer. The muscle chain that is required in these movements named as the “anterior and posterior chain,” should be exercised to build strength, stability and power.

The most useful workouts are the core lifts, like squats and deadlifts for forming these muscles. The general soccer fitness program may be used commonly but these two core lifts are very essential for leg, hip, back and abdominal strength.

Swimming can also help to add strength to shoulders, arms and back muscles.

Typically strength programs involve heavy masses with only some repetitions. You should be knowing by now that unlike other sports requiring bulk and weight soccer is a sport that requires strength with mobility, speed and stamina.

Strengthening highly vulnerable muscle groups could also add to the performance benefits in the absence of primary strength, power or endurance gains. These include the lower back and hamstrings, and the quadriceps muscles that direct knee joint function.

This is it. Please try to consider these areas while weight training soccer as you know now that football unlike other sports do not require weights essentially. You should consider joining our youth soccer coaching society that has a plethora of informative articles, weekly newsletters, and videos to help you better understand the concepts of youth coaching.

Andre Botelho is a recognized authority in youth soccer coaching and has already helped thousands of youth coaches to dramatically improve their coaching skills. Learn  how to explode your players’ skills and make training fun by downloading your free ebook at: Soccer Practice Tips.

You would be surprised to find out that the objective of weight training soccer is to develop the muscles that support the joints instead of just focusing on growing muscle mass. For this purpose special fitness training programs should be designed to let the players have some time, away from both the field and the ball to work on target muscle groups.

This will result in improved mobility and flexibility for enhanced swiftness and power.

Core: Technically the first area to focus on is the abdominals, commonly known as the core. The part of the body below the breast bone till the lowest part of the pelvis area is referred to as the “core”. This part of the body is responsible for power generation, maintain the center of gravity and balancing the body.

Thus the core is the center point from where all the physical action originates. A powerful and sound abdominal core also confirms a well-balanced back, particularly the Lumbar area. This also generates a good posture.

Soccer Fitness

Legs: The leg muscles called quadriceps are vital in pumping the heart. This means that these are the biggest muscle groups of the body and are responsible for pumping a huge amount of blood volume. Walking can also be helpful in weight training soccer as each step pumps blood supply to the entire body.

A lot of energy is exerted in hitting the ground, thus it is very important to have powerful and well-balanced leg muscles required by the hips, knees and the ankles.

Back, Chest and Neck: These parts of the body work as a connection between the “core” and the ends (legs, arms and the head). These areas must never be neglected in soccer strength training because their growth is linked with the rest of the body.

Arms: For balancing the body arms are very helpful; example while jumping to head a ball or shifting directions. A powerful jump is made by throwing the arms in the air.

Plyometric: You should combine weight training with well-organized plyometric program for great results. This will create individual or teams who will show growth during the first half of the season.

Special attention must be given to the core as only a well-developed soccer fitness program to improve the core will definitely target these zones.

Program: Usually a program that is calculable and particular to an individual’s requirement should be applied at the start of the season. The thorough improvement of an individual consist of aiming specific parts of the body first with the core and then heading for every section of the body.

We conclude the session by saying that weight training soccer can be better comprehended by mentally preparing the players and the team where both of them motivate each other to own the program. You can subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community and find an answer to all questions as the site offers loads of information in form of articles, videos, and newsletters.

Andre Botelho is the author of “The Expert Youth Soccer Coaching Guide” and he’s a recognized expert in the subject of youth soccer coaching. Learn  how to explode your players’ skills and make coaching sessions fun in less than 29 days! Download your free pdf guide at: Kids Soccer Drills.

Weight training soccer is vital for sports training in today’s soccer world; you might be aware of that already, as it is required for creating tougher and faster muscles. Your players will have a chance to play at a higher level if they develop themselves using this soccer fitness plan discussed as follows.

Soccer weight training requires muscles to be strong, speedy and resistant instead of adding pounds of useless bulk in muscles. Upper body weight training for soccer is not as important as is for the legs, but we still do it for overall conditioning and strength.

I think fitness training should start with the legs. Begin with the squatting exercises. When you are done with this warm up activity players are supposed to do 20 reps, so bar to be loaded should be according to their capacity. Assuming that they are quite strong, therefore they should begin with 220 pounds. This practice is performed by getting below the bar, and putting it across their upper back and then stand up with it.

Now they must stand keeping their shoulders and feet width apart. They must hold it as they go down until their hips are slightly lower than the top of their knees. In weight training soccer, after coming to this point the players should quickly stand up fully and breathe out. The players must be encouraged to continue even when they are worn-out till they do 20 reps.

Soccer Fitness

They should be given a break of 5-10 minutes before switching to the leg curl machine to work on hamstrings. 4 sets of 15 reps each should be completed by them. They will be required to perform 4 sets of 15 reps on the Stiff-Legged Dead lift between each set of Leg Curl exercises. Hamstrings are vital for players speed, thus we would want them to be strong enough.

The leg exercises will be completed with 3 sets of 25 reps on the Standing calf-raise machine.

The Incline bench press would be used to start the upper body exercises.
Now when the they are warmed up they must go on by including enough weights so that the next set of 10 reps is harder to do. They are supposed keep on doing weights for a total of 5 sets of 10 reps, while stretching their chest and shoulders, however taking a break of 2 minutes between each set.

Now we move to the second workout of this session of soccer strength training which are the pull-up exercises. This exercise should be done with the palms facing their body so that their biceps and back can become strong. The last part of the upper body portion of this workout is to work out the abdominals and 5 sets of 20 or more reps of leg raises would do well. Conclude with 5 sets of 50 or more crunching exercises.

In short weight training soccer is only a small portion of the complete training program required to make great soccer players. You are invited to become a member of our youth soccer coaching society to gain more about various weight training exercises relevant to the game of soccer; The society that has videos, articles, pod casts, and newsletters available for you.

Andre Botelho is known online as “The Expert Youth Soccer Coach” and his free ebooks and reports have been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Learn how to skyrocket your players’ skills and make practice sessions fun in record time. Download your free ebook at: Soccer Practice.

The truth is that if that you should concentrate on enhancing your team’s weight training soccer sessions when you train them with weights. You will be losing numerous advantages of soccer-specific fitness if you ignore it.

Soccer strength training is only understood correctly by selected coaches. Today’s young soccer players must be “complete athletes”.

The youth player of today needs to have the upper body strength to struggle with challenges and besides that he must always be quick and speedy. Both aerobic and anaerobic stamina are needed at an extra ordinary level to keep going till the end. A coach should know that he is hamming himself, his team and the game if he just insists his players to do weight lifting as the body builders do.

The sports requiring strength mainly in addition to body building, workout to enhance size, bulk and maximum strength. They will not worry if it destroys their aerobic endurance levels or their quickness and flexibility.

Soccer Fitness

One would miss out a great deal from your fitness training sessions if he/she also uses the typical 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions the entire year.

Let’s understand why

Kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting and turning as well as good speed during soccer comes from lower body strength. Shielding the ball and making the opponts to stay away, requires upper body strength.

In weight training soccer, “strength” can be divided into three categories.

Absolute or Maximum Strength: The highest level of power your muscles can exert in a single, quick motion. For instance, a person who can do 250lbs leg press has greater power than the other player having the ability of doing 200lbs leg press.

A good absolute power is useful in soccer to keep the opponents off and defending the ball. Most essentially, it is the basis for muscular pace and potential.

Muscular Power: It is the product of both maximum strength and the quickness in movement. Explosive power will be produced if one of them is enhanced while keeping the other one the same.

By just following the traditional weight training program that many popular fitness magazines promote; only power will be increased. While those traditional soccer fitness programs can also be altered increasing the speed of contraction.

Strength Endurance: The capability of a muscle group to carry out frequent and high-power actions. Strength endurance, similar to power is very vital to the game of soccer.

If you are a coach you should concentrate on increasing strength endurance during your soccer routine. If you follow the simple 3 sets of 8-12 reps each, traditional weight programs are not very useful for developing soccer-specific strength endurance.

Your game is about to improve 10 folds if you just put a little time in planning your weight training soccer program correctly. You are invited to become a member of our youth soccer coaching society to gain more from the reserve of soccer resources like articles, periodic newsletters, and videos at our youth soccer coaching community.

Andre Botelho is a recognized expert in youth soccer coaching. He influences well over 35,000 youth coaches each year with his unique coaching philosophy, and makes it really easy to explode your players’ skills and make training more fun in record time. To download your free youth soccer coaching guide visit: Weight training soccer.