How Playing Soccer Enhances Cardiorespiratory Fitness

The way soccer works to enhance cardiorespiratory fitness is simplicity itself. You pull on your cleats, trot onto the field, and jog, stroll, run and all-out sprint for the best part of 45 minutes at an indoor game and 90 minutes outdoors. Exercise scientists, particularly in Europe, look in detail at measures of cardiovascular fitness demonstrated by elite players such as Barcelona’s Lionel Messi. They also gather metrics on recreational players, including adults new to the sport, to quantify soccer’s boost to fitness.

Time Frame

A doctor couldn’t order a better prescription than a game of soccer for better heart and lung fitness that meets and exceeds federal guidelines on healthy living. In fact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in its Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, recommends aerobic activities totaling two hours and 30 minutes a week at a moderate level or vigorous activities for one hour and 15 minutes a week. You can also combine moderate and vigorous activities. One 90-minute outdoor soccer game played vigorously fits the bill, and multiple games and practices exceed these goals. In fact, the guidelines explicitly name soccer, basketball and hockey as vigorous activities.

Significance

Cardiovascular fitness refers to the body’s ability to engage in whole-body exercise that lasts for several minutes or more, writes Gareth Stratton in “Youth Soccer: From Science to Performance.” Soccer demands cardiovascular fitness as one of several fitness components, including strength and endurance. Soccer also requires you to work on agility, balance, speed and coordination as part of skill-specific fitness.

Physical Effects

The aerobic workout provided by soccer changes your body. Your heart and blood volume increases, which allows you to take up more oxygen as you run on the field. Your muscles become better served by oxygen-rich blood as capillaries proliferate, note Danish soccer science pioneers Jens Bangsbo and Peter Krustup in their paper, “Physical Demands and Training of Top-Class Soccer Players.” A tiptop athlete such as Messi especially benefits from these changes in muscle metabolism, which lower the production of lactate, a byproduct of exertion that causes the muscles to burn during the game.

Application

Cardiovascular fitness allows you perform well even in the waning moments of a game, crucial to scoring if your team needs a goal or defending if you are ahead. Cardiovascular fitness not only improves your endurance in the home stretch of a match but also allows you to recover from intense exercise, Bangsbo and Krustup note. Thus you can sprint down the field, recover during a brief stroll back, and repeat the effort. This fitness allows you to avoid lapses in concentration, to maintain your technical performance and demonstrate the hustle that coaches admiringly call a “good work rate” in soccer terminology.