You should know how true it is to work on your team’s weight training soccer program, while they are being trained with weights. You will be losing numerous advantages of soccer-specific fitness if you ignore it.
Only a certain number of coaches’ know the correct ideology of soccer strength training. Players of youth soccer teams are supposed to be “complete athletes” now days.
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.
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. While the strength of the upper body, is also important. It is used to shield the ball keeping off the opponents.
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. 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. Principally, it establishes muscular quickness and power.
Muscular Power: It is the outcome of both absolute strength and the speed of movement. A valuable power will be created that is “explosive power”, if you improve one of them without lowering the other.
A large number of the magazines promote generalized weight training programs that will merely increase power. But even those generalized soccer fitness programs can be improved if you deliberately enhance the speed of contraction.
Strength Endurance: The capability of a muscle group to carry out frequent and high-power actions. Like power, strength endurance is also very important to soccer game.
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.
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