Soccer Coaching Drills

What if I told you that weight training soccer is aimed at enhancing strength rather than the building of muscle mass, especially the growth of muscle groups that support the joints? This requires special fitness training program without the ball and off the field in order to give time to focus on particular muscle groups.

This will result in improved mobility and flexibility for enhanced swiftness and power.

Core: The area that is first to be targeted are the abdominals, which is usually called the core. The area of the body below the breast bone up till the groin or the base of the pelvic region is considered as the “core”. This area is the source of power, the center of gravity, and the balancing center of the body.

Thus the core is the center point from where all the physical action originates. A good and established abdominal core also leads to a well-balanced back, mainly the Lumbar part. This in turn creates and enhances a better posture.

Soccer Fitness

Legs: The quadriceps pump the heart. Hence they are the major muscle groups of the body and provide enormous amount of blood volume. So, even walking is good exercise in weight training soccer as each leg helps the heart push a lot of blood through the entire body.

A lot of energy is exerted in hitting the ground, thus it is very important to have powerful and well-balanced leg muscles required by the hips, knees and the ankles.

Back, Chest and Neck: These parts of the body work as a connection between the “core” and the ends (legs, arms and the head). These areas must never be neglected in soccer strength training because their growth is linked with the rest of the body.

Arms: Arms facilitate in the balancing of the body through weight distribution, especially when jumping to head a ball or changing directions. Keeping your arms in the air makes a forceful jump.

Plyometric: A mixture of weight training with well-organized plyometric program must be practiced for quality results. They work alongside to create an individual and a team that will show improvements well within the first half of the season.

The key again is going back to the core, because only a well-developed soccer fitness program to develop the core will naturally bring these areas into focus.

Programs: Generally, a program that is quantifiable and specific to an individual needs to be applied at the beginning of the season. Concentrating on specific areas of the body starting with the core and searing outwards to each section of the body is vital to the total development of an individual.

In conclusion, this concept of weight training soccer can be better understood through mental training of the team where both the team and individual players encourage each other to own the program. You can subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community and find an answer to all questions as the site offers loads of information in form of articles, videos, and newsletters.

Andre Botelho is the author of “The Expert Youth Soccer Coaching Guide” and he’s a recognized expert in the subject of youth soccer coaching. Learn  how to explode your players’ skills and make coaching sessions fun in less than 29 days! Download your free pdf guide at: Kids Soccer Drills.

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times that weight training soccer is a major part of sports training these days as it creates stronger and faster muscles. The program of soccer fitness talked about in this article will aid you make your players ready for playing soccer at an advanced level.

Soccer weight training requires muscles to be strong, speedy and resistant instead of adding pounds of useless bulk in muscles. Although the lower body strength is more important in soccer but we still carry on with the upper body weight trainings for overall conditioning and strength.

I recommend you begin your fitness training with the legs. Start with squats. When you are done with this warm up activity players are supposed to do 20 reps, so bar to be loaded should be according to their capacity. Considering that they have good strength, hence give them 220 pounds to start with. They have to get under the bar, with it resting across their upper back, and stand up with it.

Instruct them to step back out of the racks and stand with their feet, shoulder width apart or wider. Then they should come down while holding it till their hips are only marginally lower than the top of their knees. At this point in weight training soccer, players should quickly rise to the full standing position and exhale. The players must be encouraged to continue even when they are worn-out till they do 20 reps.

Soccer Fitness

They should be given a break of 5-10 minutes before switching to the leg curl machine to work on hamstrings. 4 sets of 15 reps each should be completed by them. In between each set of Leg Curls, they’ll also be doing 4 sets of 15 reps on the Stiff-Legged Dead lift. As player’s speed is greatly improves by strong hamstrings, so they should be very tough.

After completing 3 sets of 25 reps on the Standing calf-raise machine your leg exercises will be over.

Start the upper body workout with the Incline bench press.
After a warm up exercise, guide players to add enough weight so that the next set of 10 reps gets difficult. They should continue with that weight for 5 sets of 10 repetitions total, while stretching their chest and shoulders, and resting for around 2 minutes between each set.

The second exercise for this portion of the soccer strength training is pull-ups. Players should do this with their palms facing their body to work their biceps as well as the back. The last part of the upper body portion of this workout is to work out the abdominals and 5 sets of 20 or more reps of leg raises would do well. Then finish with 5 sets of 50 or more crunches or sit-ups.

We would say in the end that to make quality players of soccer, weight training soccer is only a small fragment of the entire training program. You are invited to become a member of our youth soccer coaching society to gain more about various weight training exercises relevant to the game of soccer; The society that has videos, articles, pod casts, and newsletters available for you.

Andre Botelho is known online as “The Expert Youth Soccer Coach” and his free ebooks and reports have been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Learn how to skyrocket your players’ skills and make practice sessions fun in record time. Download your free ebook at: Soccer Practice.

Let’s face it. If you train your team with weights there’s no reason why should not fine-tune their weight training soccer routine as the year progresses. In case you are not giving much attention to it, you are losing lots of advantages of soccer-specific fitness.

Soccer strength training is only understood correctly by selected coaches. A young soccer player of today should be a “complete athlete”.

They have to be quick off the mark and have to have the upper body strength to defy challenges. They need outstanding levels of both aerobic and anaerobic stamina to last the duration. A coach should know that he is hamming himself, his team and the game if he just insists his players to do weight lifting as the body builders do.

In body building and the sports which need strength primarily, players struggle to develop themselves in terms of size, bulk and ultimate strength. They’re not very much troubled if it damages their aerobic endurance levels or even their quickness and flexibility.

Soccer Fitness

If you also tend do is follow the typical 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions all year round, you’re far from getting the best from your fitness training sessions.

We will now see the reasons

In soccer, lower body strength is needed for kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting, and turning and also lays the foundation for great speed. Shielding the ball and making the opponts to stay away, requires upper body strength.

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

Absolute or Maximum Strength: The highest level of power your muscles can exert in a single, quick motion. For example, a who can leg press 250 lbs has greater strength than another player who can leg press only 200 lbs.

During soccer, this kind of strength is helpful in keeping the opponent off and defending the ball. Principally, it establishes muscular quickness and power.

Muscular Power: Power is a result of both absolute strength and the speed of movement. If you increase either of these, without lowering the other, the explosive power of players will increase.

But, if you just follow a generalized weight training routine that most of the popular fitness magazines advocate, you will increase power. But even those generalized soccer fitness programs can be improved if you deliberately enhance the speed of contraction.

Strength Endurance: Strength or muscular stamina is the ability of a muscle group to carry out repeated 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. General weight programs are not very useful if you use the common 3 sets of 8-12 reps each.

Your game is about to improve 10 folds if you just put a little time in planning your weight training soccer program correctly. You should consider joining our youth soccer coaching society for you can gain more from the reserve of soccer resources like articles, periodic newsletters, and videos at our youth soccer coaching community.

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.