The truth is that if that you should concentrate on enhancing your team’s weight training soccer sessions when you train them with weights. You will be losing numerous advantages of soccer-specific fitness if you ignore it.
Only some of the coaches understand soccer strength training correctly. Youth soccer players are required to be “complete athletes” now.
They have to be quick off the mark and have to have the upper body strength to defy challenges. Players need to build their aerobic and anaerobic at the highest level to carry on until the game is over. 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.
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.
One would miss out a great deal from your fitness training sessions if he/she also uses the typical 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions the entire year.
The reasons are as follows:
In soccer, lower body strength is needed for kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting, and turning and also lays the foundation for great speed. Upper body strength, on the other hand, is needed for shielding the ball, and keeping the opponents off.
When it comes to weight training soccer, we can divide “strength” into three broad categories.
Absolute or Maximum Strength: The highest level of power your muscles can exert in a single, quick motion. An athlete who can do 250lbs leg press has more power than the one who can just do 200lb leg press.
During soccer, this kind of strength is helpful in keeping the opponent off and defending the ball. More importantly, it forms the foundation of muscular pace and power.
Muscular Power: Absolute strength and the speed of action both add up to produce power. Explosive power will be produced if one of them is enhanced while keeping the other one the same.
Only power will be enhanced if you just simply use the common trainings that almost all of the popular fitness magazines advocate. Those traditional soccer fitness programs can also can be amended if you intentionally increase contraction speed.
Strength Endurance: Strength or muscular stamina is the ability of a muscle group to carry out repeated and high-intensity movements. The game of soccer requires strength endurance which has similar importance as power.
Therefore strength endurance should be given importance to in your soccer training programs. Going back to the basic 3 sets of 8-12 reps each, general weights programs are unproductive 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 invited to become a member of our youth soccer coaching society to 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.
Tags: fitness training, soccer fitness, soccer strength training, Weight training soccer