When you play professional soccer, your ability to compete can affect not only your personal stats, but your club's financial performance, if your missed kick or block cost the team a shot at the playoffs. To perform at a world-class level and keep your job, you'll need to train correctly year round.
What You Need to Train
Soccer requires almost every sport skill, including aerobic and anaerobic conditioning, limit, explosive and reactive power, muscular endurance, speed, quickness, balance and agility. These skill use different muscle fibers and energy systems, and training one can interfere with another. Create different training seasons to cover the off-season, pre-season, in-season and active recovery phase.
Off-Season Training
During your off-season, work on building muscle and aerobic conditioning. You may not need to use maximum weights or resistance levels since you are not bodybuilding; however, you will need to use more than the lighter dumbbells you use to train muscular endurance. Consider using more than 50 percent of the maximum weight you can lift to perform three to five sets of three to five reps of an exercise, two or more times each week. To build your legs, do deadlifts, squats, lunges, presses and hamstring curls. Take 24 to 48 hours between workouts to allow your muscles to repair. This is also the time to do jogging or other aerobic conditioning work.
Pre-Season Training
As you get closer to your season, you will taper off weight and aerobic training. Begin working on muscular endurance using lighter weights and perform more reps per set. Increase the intensity of cardio workouts. By the end of your pre-season, you should be sprint training, using one- or two-minute bursts of high-intensity activity followed by two minutes of rest. Soccer uses more high-twitch muscle fibers and anaerobic energy during games than weightlifting or aerobic exercise does, so you'll want to use sport-specific movements as you get close to your season. At the beginning of your pre-season training, add explosive strength drills such as box squats and one- and two-leg box jumps. Toward the end of this phase do more reactive, or plyometric, drills, such as depth jumps, skipping and reactive squats. Add speed, quickness and agility drills, using a rope ladder, resistance cords for overspeed training and other footwork drills that make you move forward, back, laterally and on the diagonal.
In-Season Training
During the season, use training methods that mirror the demands of soccer. This means reactive power, speed, agility and quickness drills. Limit weight work to muscular endurance workouts, such as a circuit training workout. During circuit training, you move from exercise to exercise, using lighter weights and eight to 10 reps, followed by a one-minute rest.
Active Rest
It's important to give your body a chance to recover after the season ends. During this period, which could be a month or longer, depending on your pro season schedule, you cross train with swimming, cycling, basketball, tennis or other sports that keep you active but aren't as intense as your soccer matches. If you are very competitive, resist the temptation to hit the tennis or basketball court at maximum intensity for an hour or more.
Member Comments