According to the American Council on Exercise, fartlek training can help improve your cardiovascular endurance and speed while reducing the risk of injuries that come from continuous, repetitive actions. If you are gearing up for soccer season, fartlek training a few times a week can help prepare your body for the speed and endurance requirements ahead.
Definition
Fartlek is a Swedish term for speed play. Fartleks are a kind of free-form interval training. You can design your own program depending on how much time you have and what you want to accomplish. You can either set a time or distance goal: 20 minutes or two miles after a 10-minute warm-up, for example. Then you decide how to vary your pace along the route. You can either use a stopwatch or visual cues like a telephone pole, blue car, white house and barking dog. You might start off walking briskly to the telephone pole, then sprinting to the blue car, jogging slowly to the white house and sprinting to the barking dog.
Endurance
Your body uses different systems to power short bursts of activity like sprinting 50 meters and sustained long-term activities like running five miles. Because fartleks change pace often, you have the opportunity to improve both speed and endurance, which are critical in soccer.
Variety
Fartleks are supposed to add fun and variety to your workout. They are highly adaptable, and you can individualize them to your own current fitness level and change them as you improve. If you are coaching an entire team, each member of the team can run the same course and change his intensity level at the same place on the course.
Specificity
Specificity of training means that when you train for a sport, you need to train exactly the types of strengths you need to perform that sport. Soccer involves intense bursts of running and lots of stopping, starting and changes of direction.
Programs
To get better at soccer, your fartlek program should have the same elements as the game: short, frequent sprints, several minutes of hard running below a sprint pace, moderate-intensity recovery times and unpredictable changes of pace and direction. As an example, after a 10-minute jogging warm-up, you could run hard for two minutes, then jog for one minute to recover before starting an all-out sprint for 30 seconds. As you continue along the course, you could follow a similar pattern, making sure to change the times of the intervals and allow active recovery periods -- jogging or brisk walking -- after the hard runs and sprints.
Recommendations
You can do fartleks as a team or alone, but the team environment provides motivation and a sense of competitiveness. In the offseason, when you have no coach or team to help you, consider training with a fitness-minded friend who can motivate you to keep going.
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