Soccer Footwork 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. You will be losing numerous advantages of soccer-specific fitness if you ignore it.

Soccer strength training is only understood correctly by selected coaches. Players of youth soccer teams are supposed to be “complete athletes” now days.

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. 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.

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

In case you are planning to follow the typical 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions all year round, you are not going to get the best from your fitness training programs.

The reasons are as follows:

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.

A good absolute power is useful in soccer to keep the opponents off and defending the ball. Principally, it establishes muscular quickness and power.

Muscular Power: Power is a result 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. While those traditional soccer fitness programs can also be altered increasing the speed of contraction.

Strength Endurance: It is the capacity of a muscle group to make repetitive and high-intensity movements. Strength endurance and power both are essential for soccer.

If you are a coach you should concentrate on increasing strength endurance during your soccer routine. General weight programs are not very useful if you use the common 3 sets of 8-12 reps each.

Do yourself a favor and invest some time to plan your weight training soccer program correctly and it will certainly pay off ten-fold on the field. 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. 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.

Here are the basic principles of weight training for soccer displaying simple activities to describe 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. For instance: Runners run and swimmers swim.

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

Having this information when preparing a fitness training program, can lead to a good start.

Such exercises should be planned for physical conditioning which improves 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. The effects of injury prevention are not evident directly but  they are essential in player’s performance and confirm that the player is fit to play at the most important occasions of the calendar.

Soccer is a sport which involves running, sprinting, turning and twisting, side-stepping, and setting for an attempt. It is therefore necessary that the chains of muscles used in these activities, called the “anterior and posterior chain,” are worked upon for strength, stability and power.

The best exercises for developing these muscles are the core lifts, like squats and deadlifts. The normal soccer fitness program should useful if special importance is given to these two core lifts that are crucial for leg, hip, back and abdominal strength.

You may also include a swimming program to focus added attention on the shoulders, arms and back muscles.

Strength programs normally consist of heavy loads and a small number of repetitions. Some sports require bulk and strength while some others have to ensure they combine adequate strength with mobility, speed and stamina like a mid-fielder in soccer.

Working on very special muscle groups can also enhance the performance even if primary strength, power or endurance gains are lacking. These include 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 can also join 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? 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: The abdominals, titled as the ‘core’ is the area first area to concentrate upon. 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.

In other words, the core is where all physical actions of the body are initiated from. 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 are helpful in pumping the heart. Thus being the biggest muscle groups of the body pump great volumes of blood. 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. A powerful jump is made by throwing the arms in the air.

Plyometric: A mixture of weight training with well-organized plyometric program must be practiced for quality results. They work alongside to create an individual and a team that will show improvements well within the first half of the season.

The key again is going back to the core, because only a well-developed soccer fitness program to develop the core will naturally bring these areas into focus.

Programs: Generally, a program that is quantifiable and specific to an individual needs to be applied at the beginning 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.

Finally it should be said that weight training soccer can be useful by first preparing the players; as it requires the players and the team 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. 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. Though the importance of upper body weight training for soccer is not as much as the legs, we still go on with it for general conditioning and strength.

I think fitness training should start with the legs. Begin with the squatting exercises. After a light warm-up set, load the bar to a weight you think your players can get 20 reps with. 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.

They should then get out of the stands and stand with their feet and shoulder width apart. Next they move downwards keeping hold of the bar up until their hips are just below the upper part 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. Hamstrings are vital for players speed, thus we would want them to be strong enough.

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

Start the upper body workout with the Incline bench press.
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.

Now we move to the second workout of this session of soccer strength training which are the pull-up exercises. They should work out on their biceps and back by making their palms facing their body. Finally the upper body exercises include abdominals and performing 5 sets of 20 or more reps of leg raises. Conclude with 5 sets of 50 or more crunching exercises.

We would say in the end that to make quality players of soccer, weight training soccer is only a small fragment of the entire training program. To know more about various weight training exercises relevant to the game of soccer, subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community 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.