Soccer requires you to be fit and ready to display your speed on the field. The sport attracts speedsters with "wheels" as soccer players say among themselves. Players such as Elodie Thomis of France's national women's team combine ball skills with track-star acceleration, forcing defenders to put their heads down and try to keep up. Even on recreational teams, forwards and sweepers often have tremendous sprinting ability, thus the fitness training mix for soccer typically includes a heavy dose of sprints.
Expert Insight
During a game, soccer demands unpredictable patterns of movement. On average, players perform an all-out sprint every 90 seconds and run strongly every 30 seconds, according to time-motion studies by U.K.-based sports scientist Thomas Reilly. The periods between jogs, runs and sprints varies "and may be in some instances too short to permit a full recovery before having to sprint again," Reilly notes in "The Science of Training: Soccer." Thus fitness routines need to prepare you to demonstrate speed, fast recovery, quick movements and an ability to sustain activity, Reilly concludes.
Significance
Because of soccer's repeated demands for sprints with erratic recovery periods, fitness trainers at the elite level -- with few exceptions -- shun longer runs. They view these as counterproductive in encouraging the explosive movements required of soccer sprinting. Training focuses on sprints of 30 yards, or sometimes 10 or 20 yards, somewhat short of American football's focus on the 40-yard dash.
Application
Soccer demands multiple sprints over 90 minutes or more. To arrive at a fitness routine, coaches advocate a mix of sprint endurance drills, shuttles that repeat sprints and varied-intensity training called fartleks. In "Complete Conditioning for Soccer," University of North Carolina conditioning coach Greg Gatz advises not performing such drills two days in a row. As the name suggests, the 7-by-30 sprint recovery drill, an example of a sprint endurance drill, involves seven 30-yard sprints with active recovery; that is, jogging between sprints. Shuttle-style conditioning entails completing a designated distance, such as 300 yards, by repeatedly running from the end line to the 50- or 25-yard line until 300 yards are covered. Fartleks can be set up in a number of ways, including 10 minutes of sprinting, jogging, walking and backpedaling in segments of 10 to 20 seconds.
Exceptions
Trainers such as high school coaches might recommend longer runs of 20 minutes or so three times a week in the offseason to maintain conditioning if you don't have access to playing the game itself, the preferred alternative for general fitness. And at the highest levels of the sport, certain trainers find a primary role for longer runs. For example, Pierre Barrieu, conditioning coach for the U.S. men's national team, assigns the team at the beginning of camp to two 20-minute or three 15-minute runs at 75 percent of maximum intensity. These runs phase out as camp continues, replaced by 15-second sprints at 85 percent intensity.
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