Soccer Drills

It’s very true, that while training your players with weights you should also consider improving their weight training soccer practices as the year goes by. And if you don’t, you’re giving up some great benefits of soccer-specific fitness.

Only some of the coaches understand soccer strength training correctly. Youth soccer players are required to be “complete athletes” now.

The players are supposed to be speedy in their actions along with the upper body strength to meet challenges. Players need to build their aerobic and anaerobic at the highest level to carry on until the game is over. One would be destroying his players, the game and even himself if he just tells his players to lift weights like any body builder.

When we talk about such sports like body building and players whose sports involve strength, we would say that they should try to increase in size, bulk and extreme strength. They will not worry if it destroys their aerobic endurance levels or their quickness and flexibility.

Soccer Fitness

If you also tend do is follow the typical 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions all year round, you’re far from getting the best from your fitness training sessions.

Let’s understand why

In soccer, lower body strength is needed for kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting, and turning and also lays the foundation for great speed. Shielding the ball and making the opponts to stay away, requires upper body strength.

“Strength” can be divided into three categories, when we talk about weight training soccer.

Absolute or Maximum Strength: The highest level of power your muscles can exert in a single, quick motion. For example, a who can leg press 250 lbs has greater strength than another player who can leg press only 200 lbs.

In soccer, good maximal strength is advantageous in holding off the opponents and defending the ball. Principally, it establishes muscular quickness and power.

Muscular Power: It is the product of both maximum strength and the quickness in movement. A valuable power will be created that is “explosive power”, if you improve one of them without lowering the other.

By just following the traditional weight training program that many popular fitness magazines promote; only power will be increased. But if you put effort to improve your contraction speed, even those types of soccer fitness programs can become useful.

Strength Endurance: Strength or muscular stamina is the ability of a muscle group to carry out repeated and high-intensity movements. Strength endurance and power both are essential for soccer.

A great significant should be given to include strength endurance in your program. Going back to the basic 3 sets of 8-12 reps each, general weights programs are unproductive for developing soccer-specific strength endurance.

Make a favor to yourself and put some time in improving your weight training soccer program correctly and I assure you that it will pay back 10 times in the game. You should consider joining our youth soccer coaching society for you can 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.

You may not agree, but check this out. You can greatly benefit from weight training soccer when coaching your players in a sport that requires a lot of strength, and, or explosive power. Strong abdominal and lower back muscles are also essential for players for whom strength and power is not the main issue.

This article will teach you the basic theories of weight training for soccer using simple methods for presenting those theories.

During soccer strength training, Specificity is a very important concept. The theory is to design your training sessions to match the player’s activity on the field. Take for example running and swimming, a great exercise for runners and swimmers respectively.

Speed is the main factor to put effort to when training, so as to develop power. 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

When this kind of information is available to a coach while planning a fitness training program, it ensures a good start.

Physical conditioning usually requires activities that improve specific training. For example: swimmers also run and lift weights to improve their aerobic and strength and power fitness.

Injury prevention is also something which is commonly overlooked although it is an important part of weight training soccer. Injury prevention even though not directly contributing to the play, is important as it ensures that the players are fit to play at the most critical times of the year.

A sport like soccer includes activities such as running, sprinting, turning and twisting, side-stepping, going for a hit. To develop strength, stability and power the chain of muscles titled as the “anterior and posterior chain,” involved in these activities should be given attention.

The best exercises for developing these muscles are the core lifts, like squats and deadlifts. A comprehensive soccer fitness program giving due stress upon these two core lifts should work miracles for leg, hip, back and abdominal strength.

The program can also consist of swimming to highlight the areas of 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.

Even if primary strength, power or endurance gains are absent, developing particular muscle groups would also help to increase performance. These muscle groups are the lower back and hamstrings, and the quadriceps muscles that direct knee joint function.

So this is it. Always remember these points while weight training soccer since in sport like soccer weights may not give much advantage. You are welcomed to our youth soccer coaching community 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.

How about if you get to learn that weight training soccer targets improving strength instead of just increasing muscle mass, particularly the development of muscle groups that support the joints? It calls for special fitness training sessions off the field and off the ball with a view to segregate and concentrate on certain muscle groups.

By this technique those areas will give better movement and flexibility resulting in increased pace and strength.

Core: The number one part to be focused named as “core”, refers to abdominals. The area of the body ranging from under the breast bone up till the end of the pelvic region is called the “core”. This portion of the body is the origin point of power, gravity and balance in the body.

Hence all the physical actions are initiated from the core Great abdominal cores also results in a well-balanced back, most essentially the Lumbar area. This also generates a good posture.

Soccer Fitness

Legs: The quadriceps pump 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. So, even walking is good exercise in weight training soccer as each leg helps the heart push a lot of blood through 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: This portion of the body provides relationship 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: Arms facilitate in the balancing of the body through weight distribution, especially when jumping to head a ball or changing directions. Throwing your arms in the air adds force to a jump.

Plyometric: A mixture of weight training with well-organized plyometric program must be practiced for quality results. This will create individual or teams who will show growth during the first half of the season.

Always remember to give importance to the core as only a well-developed soccer fitness program to develop the core will positively aim these areas.

Program: Usually a program that is calculable and particular to an individual’s requirement should be applied at the start of the season. The comprehensive development of the player comprises of directing attention to specific areas of the body initiating with the core till each section of the body.

In conclusion, this concept of weight training soccer can be better understood through mental training of the team where both the team and individual players encourage each other to own the program. You are invited to become a member of our youth soccer coaching society 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.

It is very commonly heard nowadays that weight training soccer is a major factor of sports training in today’s times as it creates tougher and quicker muscles. The soccer fitness plan discussed in this article will help you prepare your players for playing soccer at a higher level.

During soccer weight training the aim is to improve the strength, speed and stamina of the muscles instead of just increasing the muscle weight. For overall conditioning and strength we still continue with the upper body weight training however its significance is not as much as the leg strength.

My suggestion is to focus your fitness training beginning with the legs. You can start the warm up session with squats. Now place the bar with which your players can make 20 reps. Supposing they are strong enough, so let them go with 220 pounds first. This practice is performed by getting below the bar, and putting it across their upper back and then stand up with it.

Instruct them to step back out of the racks and stand with their feet, shoulder width apart or wider. They must hold it as they go down until their hips are slightly lower than the top of their knees. At this point in weight training soccer, players should quickly rise to the full standing position and exhale. The players must be encouraged to continue even when they are worn-out till they do 20 reps.

Soccer Fitness

A 5-10 minutes break should be taken before moving on with the leg curl machine to work on hamstrings. 4 sets of 15 reps each should be completed by them. In between each set of Leg Curls, they’ll also be doing 4 sets of 15 reps on the Stiff-Legged Dead lift. Since hamstrings are very important to a player’s speed, so you want them to be very strong.

After completing 3 sets of 25 reps on the Standing calf-raise machine your leg exercises will be over.

The Incline bench press would be used to start the upper body exercises.
Once the players have performed the warm ups, tell them to carry on by putting more weights such that the next set of 10 reps get harder. 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.

In this segment of soccer strength training the second exercise is the pull-ups. Players should do this with their palms facing their body to work their biceps as well as the back. Finally the upper body exercises include abdominals and performing 5 sets of 20 or more reps of leg raises. The last in this work out are the crunches do 5 sets of 50 or more.

In conclusion, weight training soccer is only a small part of the overall training necessary to develop great soccer players. You should consider joining our youth soccer coaching society to know more about various weight training exercises relevant to the game of soccer; the community also provides 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.