Soccer Conditioning 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.

In soccer weight training, the goal is to have muscles that are strong, fast, and have great stamina rather that to add pounds of muscle mass. 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.

My suggestion is to focus your fitness training beginning with the legs. Start with squats. After a light warm-up set, load the bar to a weight you think your players can get 20 reps with. Let’s say they are pretty strong, so tell them to 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.

Next tell them to stand having their shoulders and feet width apart. Then they should come down while holding it till their hips are only marginally 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. They should be motivated to do this for 20 reps even when they are totally worked out.

Soccer Fitness

Next is working on hamstrings, but before that have a 5-10 minutes break. They are required to do 15 repetitions of 4 sets each. 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.

Begin with using the Incline bench press, for the upper body workout.
After a warm up exercise, guide players to add enough weight so that the next set of 10 reps gets difficult. They should continue with that weight for 5 sets of 10 repetitions total, while stretching their chest and shoulders, and resting for around 2 minutes between each set.

Next are the pull-up exercises in this section of soccer strength training. They should work out on their biceps and back by making their palms facing their body. 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. 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.

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.

Very few coaches get the soccer strength training right. Today’s young soccer players must be “complete athletes”.

The players are supposed to be speedy in their actions along with the upper body strength to meet challenges. They need outstanding levels of both aerobic and anaerobic stamina to last the duration. If you get your players to simply lift weights just like the bodybuilders, you are doing yourself, your team and your game a great harm.

Bodybuilders, and athletes whose sports are mainly strength based, train to increase size, bulk and utmost strength. They will not worry if it destroys their aerobic endurance levels or their quickness and flexibility.

Soccer Fitness

If you are also thinking of implementing 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions the whole year, you should know that you’ll be missing out a lot from your fitness training sessions.

We will now see the reasons

Kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting and turning as well as good speed during soccer comes from lower body strength. While the strength of the upper body, is also important. It is used to shield the ball keeping off the opponents.

Three broad categories can be made to divide “strength” in weight training soccer.

Absolute or Maximum Strength: It is the ultimate level of force that your muscle group can apply in one speedy 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 outcome of both absolute strength and the speed of movement. If you increase either of these, without lowering the other, the explosive power of players will increase.

But, if you just follow a generalized weight training routine that most of the popular fitness magazines advocate, you will increase power. Those traditional soccer fitness programs can also can be amended if you intentionally increase contraction speed.

Strength Endurance: It is the capacity of a muscle group to make repetitive and high-intensity movements. Strength endurance, similar to power is very vital to the game of 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.