It’s very true, that while training your players with weights you should also consider improving their Weight training soccer practices as the year goes by. In case you are not giving much attention to it, you are losing lots of advantages of soccer-specific fitness.

Only a certain number of coaches’ know the correct ideology of soccer strength training. A young soccer player of today should be a “complete athlete”.

The players are supposed to be speedy in their actions along with the upper body strength to meet 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.

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. If it really reduces their aerobic endurance levels and even their speed and flexibility they will not be bothered much.

Soccer Fitness

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.

We will now see the reasons

Lower body strength is vital in soccer as it is necessary in for kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting, and turning and also useful in improving speed. Shielding the ball and making the opponts to stay away, requires upper body strength.

“Strength” can be divided into three categories, when we talk about weight training soccer.

Absolute or Maximum Strength: It is the maximum energy that your muscle group can exert in a quick, single movement. A player for example doing 250lbs leg press has mightier strength than another doing 200lbs only.

A good absolute power is useful in soccer to keep the opponents off and defending the ball. More importantly, it forms the foundation of muscular pace 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.

Only power will be enhanced if you just simply use the common trainings that almost all of the popular fitness magazines advocate. While those traditional soccer fitness programs can also be altered increasing the speed of contraction.

Strength Endurance: It is the capacity of a muscle group to make repetitive and high-intensity movements. The game of soccer requires strength endurance which has similar importance as power.

At some point in your soccer training routine, as a coach, you must focus on developing strength endurance. 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 can gain more from the reserve of soccer resources like articles, periodic newsletters, and videos at our youth soccer coaching community. So subscribe today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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