Soccer
Conditioning - The 6 Elements
By Niv Orlian
Soccer
is an athletic sport and it has
become more than a game that awards
the player with the best ball skills.
Improving your body and your physical
traits, as well as chiseling your
physical weaknesses is extremely
important in modern day soccer and
the field that tends to all these
aspects is called soccer conditioning.
Soccer
conditioning is actually made up
of 6 concepts, or sub-sections if
you will. The warm up, strength,
power, endurance, agility and speed
training are key components to a
full soccer conditioning program.
I won’t go into too much detail
about them with the article at hand,
but what I do want to do is give
you a glimpse on what each component
is, how it benefits you as a soccer
player (or your players if you’re
a coach) and how it can be improved.
-Soccer
Warm Ups
At
the very beginning of soccer, players
would warm up before a match individually
and rather disorganized. Besides
of a few common warm-up and stretching
exercises, they depended on the
first minutes of play to get them
into the right condition to play
at full potential.
Nowadays,
warming up is given increasingly
higher importance, because it helps
a soccer player in two ways: it
protects you from muscle injuries
such as strains and ruptures and
it brings you to your maximum playing
ability as the match or training
session begins. A third benefit
comes from specific stretching exercises,
that make you more agile and flexible,
which is a great advantage for a
soccer player in today’s lightning
fast game.
-Soccer
Strength
Strength
is a crucial factor in soccer, since
it affects several abilities used
during a match, such as jumping,
shooting, dribbling, shielding,
balance, tackling or marking. Actually,
strength is probably the only conditioning
key component that is useful in
the same measure for all players,
regardless of their position on
the pitch. Shielding is often confused
with power, but as you will see
below there’s a difference
between the two.
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Power
Power
can refer to one of three things
in soccer: the power of your shots,
the power of your headers and the
power of your throws. Although strength
does have an important role in determining
these three attributes, you also
need to have the right technique
to make them work. So power is a
combination between strength and
technique.
For
example, when kicking a ball towards
the goal, strength will work towards
a more powerful shot if you have
trained out your abs, lower back
and leg muscles, but at the same
time you’ll need to kick the
ball perfectly if you want to achieve
a truly powerful and accurate shot.
As a tire commercial once put it…power
is nothing without control.
-Soccer
Endurance
There
are two types of endurance, short
and long range. Short endurance
refers to your ability to sprint
longer and long endurance is more
general and it helps you pull
off an entire match. It’s
important to know that endurance
isn’t just about being able
to run for the ball longer in
a match. If you get tired, you
will also have a harder time focusing
on the game, jumping, tackling,
dribbling, finishing and so forth.
So having good endurance can help
you get the best out of yourself
for longer periods of time.
Note
that it’s very hard to get
to a level where you can run tirelessly
even in the latter stages of the
match. Even professional soccer
players that are part of the most
powerful clubs in the World tend
to get tired around the 80th minute,
or earlier if they played a high
tempo game.
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Agility
Agility
can help you on several levels
in soccer. Goalkeepers will have
better reflexes and they’ll
be able to get to high balls quicker
if they’re more agile. Defenders
will be harder to dribble and
their tackles will be more accurate
and clean with the right level
of agility. Midfielders can dribble
with ease if they’re agile
and strikers work well around
their quickness in order to get
in front of the defender and finish
on crosses, or dribble their way
to goal when possible.
-Soccer
Speed
Just
like with the power-strength confusion,
some people tend to put an equality
sign in between speed and agility.
Whereas agility refers to quick
reactions, speed refers to running
at full throttle, on a longer
distance. Actually, speed has
two components: acceleration and
top speed.
Acceleration
lasts from the moment you start
the sprint, to a second or two
before you can reach top speed.
Indeed, agility plays a crucial
role in acceleration, but has
little to do with top speed. So
focusing on agility exercises
may improve your acceleration,
but your top speed is difficult
to improve, since it’s determined
by a formula involving your lower
body strength, natural constitution
and running technique.
Niv
Orlian is the author and the owner
of a Soccer
Fans website that provides information
on various topics related to soccer
such as the history of soccer, soccer
rules, famous soccer players, soccer
fundamentals, soccer nutrition and
soccer
conditioning.
