Weight Training Soccer: A Guide To Getting Started

Weight training soccer

The truth is that if that you should concentrate on enhancing your team’s weight training soccer sessions when you train them with weights. One might be missing out great benefits of soccer-specific fitness if he/she overlooks it.

Only some of the coaches understand soccer strength training correctly. Today’s young soccer players must be “complete athletes”.

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. Players need to build their aerobic and anaerobic at the highest level to carry on until the game is over. You are harming yourself; your players and your game if you make your players to do weight lifting like body builders.

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. It does not matter much to them if it harms their aerobic endurance levels or even their speediness 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.

Let’s look upon the reasons.

While playing soccer, lower body strength is very important. It is required for kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting, and turning and also helpful in enhancing speed. Whereas the upper body strength is required for stopping the ball and keeping the opponents away.

In weight training soccer, “strength” can be divided into three categories.

Absolute or Maximum Strength: It is the greatest force that a muscle group can exert in a quick, single contraction. A player for example doing 250lbs leg press has mightier strength than another doing 200lbs only.

During soccer, this kind of strength is helpful in keeping the opponent off and defending the ball. Fundamentally it’s the foundation for muscular speed and power.

Muscular Power: Power is a result of both absolute strength and the speed of movement. Increasing any one of them, without reducing the other will generate a value added power called explosive power.

A large number of the magazines promote generalized weight training programs that will merely 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, similar to power is very vital to the game of soccer.

At some point in your soccer training routine, as a coach, you must focus on developing strength endurance. If you follow the simple 3 sets of 8-12 reps each, traditional weight programs are not very useful for developing soccer-specific strength endurance.

Your game is about to improve 10 folds if you just put a little time in planning your weight training soccer program correctly. You are welcomed to our youth soccer coaching community coming up with brand new methods and techniques it has thousands of relevant articles, videos and periodic newsletters.

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.