Weight Training Soccer: 5 Action Ideas To Get Started

by Guest Author on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 | No Comments

You should know how true it is to work on your team’s weight training soccer program, while they are being trained with weights. And if you don’t, you’re giving up some great benefits of soccer-specific fitness.

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

The players are supposed to be speedy in their actions along with the upper body strength to meet challenges. Both aerobic and anaerobic stamina are needed at an extra ordinary level to keep going till the end. One would be destroying his players, the game and even himself if he just tells his players to lift weights like any body builder.

Bodybuilders, and athletes whose sports are mainly strength based, train to increase size, bulk and utmost strength. If it really reduces their aerobic endurance levels and even their speed and flexibility they will not be bothered much.

Soccer Fitness

If you are also thinking of implementing 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions the whole year, you should know that you’ll be missing out a lot from your fitness training sessions.

The reasons are as follows:

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.

When it comes to weight training soccer, we can divide “strength” into three broad categories.

Absolute or Maximum Strength: It is the greatest force that a muscle group can exert in a quick, single contraction. An athlete who can do 250lbs leg press has more power than the one who can just do 200lb leg press.

This absolute strength helps to defend the ball and to keep off the opponents. Most essentially, it is the basis for muscular pace and potential.

Muscular Power: It is the outcome of both absolute strength and the speed of movement. Explosive power will be produced if one of them is enhanced while keeping the other one the same.

A large number of the magazines promote generalized weight training programs that will merely increase power. Those traditional soccer fitness programs can also can be amended if you intentionally increase contraction speed.

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.

If you are a coach you should concentrate on increasing strength endurance during your soccer routine. 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.

Do yourself a favor and invest some time to plan your weight training soccer program correctly and it will certainly pay off ten-fold on the field. You can gain more from the reserve of soccer resources like articles, periodic newsletters, and videos at our youth soccer coaching community. So subscribe today.

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.