The Food Critic

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

5 Ways To Soccer Conditioning

I don’t know a thing about you but I’ll bet that Soccer conditioning is the best way of making and keeping your players fit and healthy. For the uninitiated, conditioning means a mid or long term soccer fitness program that improves the physical condition of the players.

A coach should be diligent enough to ensure that training sessions comprise of both group and individual activities to per up teams play. Conditioning has 5 factors as its foundation which they must be attended to; like agility, endurance, speed, warm up, and strength. These are the building blocks of any conditioning program. Let me quickly take you through them.

Warm up: It has 3 phases that affect conditioning. First and foremost, it readies the body to take the further tough sessions. Secondly, it helps them avoid strains and muscle pulls. Lastly, it helps the players improve their flexibility which is of such paramount importance in soccer.

Strength: It is an undisputed fact that only those players who have a great body and scores of energy win matches for the team. Including a lot of weight training in soccer conditioning helps players build muscles and strength goes a long way in ensuring strong players. All those players that possess great strength magically impact the pace, poise, defensive, dribbling, headers and shooting abilities.

Endurance: It refers to a player’s skill to take control of the complete match. If they are lacking the stamina, it will bring in exhaustion and that would cause havoc with your team’s chances. What is great about it is that you do not have to plan soccer exercises for it specifically. All aerobic exercises, for example, sprints, forward runs, long passes etc aid in strength building. You need to make sure that players practice these regularly and concentrate on running both during and after the sessions.

Agility: This enables the players attack as well as defend. Normally, quickness in the players makes all the difference between expert dribbling and turnover. It also causes a successful tackle and a possible penalty kick. However, in addition to dribbling and tackling, working out your agility will also help with finishing, receiving, shielding and jumping.

Speed: Speed is important in soccer but you shouldn’t get hyped by it. As they say, it is not the players but the ball that should do the maximum running. But it must be understood that the players who are quick are most likely to win matches for their teams. So, it is a good idea to include a lot of drills in the soccer workouts that help the players work on their speed.

Believe me! Once you start to apply these to your soccer conditioning program, your players will be more confident and qualified to win tournaments. Our youth soccer coaching community has several valuable resources. There are a whole lot of expert articles, videos, newsletters etc to help you build a great soccer team. Register for it and gain from these resources.

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: Soccer conditioning.

Popularity: 32% [?]