You should know how true it is to work on your team’s weight training soccer program, while they are being trained with weights. 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. A young soccer player of today should be a “complete athlete”.
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. 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.
In body building and the sports which need strength primarily, players struggle to develop themselves in terms of size, bulk and ultimate strength. If it really reduces their aerobic endurance levels and even their speed and flexibility they will not be bothered much.
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
Lower body strength is vital in soccer as it is necessary in for kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting, and turning and also useful in improving speed. Whereas the upper body strength is required for stopping the ball and keeping the opponents away.
When it comes to weight training soccer, we can divide “strength” into three broad categories.
Absolute or Maximum Strength: It is the greatest force that a muscle group can exert in a quick, single contraction. An athlete who can do 250lbs leg press has more power than the one who can just do 200lb leg press.
In soccer, good maximal strength is advantageous in holding off the opponents and defending the ball. Most essentially, it is the basis for muscular pace and potential.
Muscular Power: It is the outcome of both absolute strength and the speed of 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. But even those generalized soccer fitness programs can be improved if you deliberately enhance the speed of contraction.
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.
Therefore strength endurance should be given importance to in your soccer training programs. Going back to the basic 3 sets of 8-12 reps each, general weights programs are unproductive for developing soccer-specific strength endurance.
If you just put some time in altering your weight training soccer accurately you will see that it will improve your game 10 times . You are welcomed to our youth soccer coaching community coming up with brand new methods and techniques it has thousands of relevant articles, videos and periodic newsletters.
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.
