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.
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.