How To Coach Soccer

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. Today’s young soccer players must be “complete athletes”.

They are required to have swift movements plus the strength of upper body to resist challenges. Both aerobic and anaerobic stamina are needed at an extra ordinary level to keep going till the end. If you get your players to simply lift weights just like the bodybuilders, you are doing yourself, your team and your game a great harm.

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.

Soccer Fitness

If you also tend do is follow the typical 3 sets of 10-12 repetitions all year round, you’re far from getting the best from your fitness training sessions.

Let’s understand why

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.

“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. For instance, a person who can do 250lbs leg press has greater power than the other player having the ability of doing 200lbs leg press.

This absolute strength helps to defend the ball and to keep off the opponents. 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. Increasing any one of them, without reducing the other will generate a value added power called explosive power.

But, if you just follow a generalized weight training routine that most of the popular fitness magazines advocate, you will increase power. But if you put effort to improve your contraction speed, even those types of soccer fitness programs can become useful.

Strength Endurance: It is the capacity of a muscle group to make repetitive and high-intensity movements. Strength endurance and power both are essential for soccer.

If you are a coach you should concentrate on increasing strength endurance during your soccer routine. General weight programs are not very useful if you use the common 3 sets of 8-12 reps each.

Do yourself a favor and invest some time to plan your weight training soccer program correctly and it will certainly pay off ten-fold on the field. You are welcomed to our youth soccer coaching community coming up with brand new methods and techniques it has thousands of relevant articles, videos and periodic newsletters.

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.

Probability you might not believe this, but just hear me out on this. While coaching players on games that involves great strength, and, or explosive power weight training soccer is very useful. If player do not need strength and power to a large extent even for them, strong abdominal and lower back muscles are helpful.

This article explains the basic principles of weight training for soccer using common activities for demonstrating those principles.

A vital principle in soccer strength training is, Specificity. The concept of this is to coach the players to put more time in working out in a way resembling their play on the field. For instance: Runners run and swimmers swim.

Speed is the main factor to put effort to when training, so as to develop power. Weight training programs should be designed in a manner that takes in to account the individuals role in team sports, their age, physical and mental ability to take pressure, and the level at which they are to play.

Soccer Fitness

When this kind of information is available to a coach while planning a fitness training program, it ensures a good start.

Physical conditioning usually requires activities that improve specific training. For instance, to improve the aerobic and strength and power fitness, swimmers also run and perform weight lifting.

One more feature in weight training soccer often ignored is prevention of injury.Another area of weight training soccer which is commonly neglected in is injury prevention. Injury prevention even though not directly contributing to the play, is important as it ensures that the players are fit to play at the most critical times of the year.

The movements executed in soccer are running, sprinting, turning and twisting, side-stepping, preparing for a goal. The “anterior and posterior chain,” are the chain of muscles which are required to perform these actions must be given importance to develop strength, stability and power.

The most useful workouts are the core lifts, like squats and deadlifts for forming these muscles. A comprehensive soccer fitness program giving due stress upon these two core lifts should work miracles for leg, hip, back and abdominal strength.

You may also include a swimming program to focus added attention on the shoulders, arms and back muscles.

Ordinary strength program comprises of doing pretty heavy weights but only a few times. You should be knowing by now that unlike other sports requiring bulk and weight soccer is a sport that requires strength with mobility, speed and stamina.

Establishing strong muscle groups can also improve to the performance even if the primary strength, power or endurance gains are absent. Thus the lower back and hamstrings, and the quadriceps muscles that aids the knee joint function are such muscle groups.

Now having equipped with knowledge always keep in mind that in weight training soccer doing weights might not give much benefit. You can also join our youth soccer coaching community that has a plethora of informative articles, weekly newsletters, and videos to help you better understand the concepts of youth coaching.

Andre Botelho is a recognized authority in youth soccer coaching and has already helped thousands of youth coaches to dramatically improve their coaching skills. Learn  how to explode your players’ skills and make training fun by downloading your free ebook at: Soccer Practice Tips.

If you get to know that weight training soccer does not encourage on adding to muscle mass rather it stresses upon the strength of muscle groups that support the joints. For this purpose special fitness training programs should be designed to let the players have some time, away from both the field and the ball to work on target muscle groups.

Focusing on these target areas will generate superior movement and flexibility causing higher velocity and strength.

Core: Technically the first area to focus on is the abdominals, commonly known as the core. “Core” is the portion of the body which starts from the breast bone till the lowermost part of the pelvis area. This part of the body is responsible for power generation, maintain the center of gravity and balancing the body.

In other words, the core is where all physical actions of the body are initiated from. Great abdominal cores also results in a well-balanced back, most essentially the Lumbar area. As a result a better posture is developed.

Soccer Fitness

Legs: The quadriceps pump the heart. This means that these are the biggest muscle groups of the body and are responsible for pumping a huge amount of blood volume. Even walking is a beneficial exercise in weight training soccer because blood is pumped through the body by each leg.

Powerful and stable leg muscles are vital for the hips, knees and the ankles to hips, to bear all the power and energy produced in hitting the ground.

Back, Chest and Neck: This portion of the body provides relationship between the core and the ends (legs, arms and the head). During soccer strength training, these parts should be given a lot of importance as their development is directly proportional to the growth of the body.

Arms: For balancing the body arms are very helpful; example while jumping to head a ball or shifting directions. A good tip for power jump is to throw your arms in the air while you jump.

Plyometric: For best results, weight training should go together with a well-planned plyometric program. With this method you will see progress within the first half of the season.

The significant point is to give importance to the core as only a well-developed soccer fitness program to develop the core will certainly target these areas.

Programs: Generally, a program that is quantifiable and specific to an individual needs to be applied at the beginning of the season. The comprehensive development of the player comprises of directing attention to specific areas of the body initiating with the core till each section of the body.

Finally it should be said that weight training soccer can be useful by first preparing the players; as it requires the players and the team to own the program. You are invited to become a member of our youth soccer coaching society and find an answer to all questions as the site offers loads of information in form of articles, videos, and newsletters.

Andre Botelho is the author of “The Expert Youth Soccer Coaching Guide” and he’s a recognized expert in the subject of youth soccer coaching. Learn  how to explode your players’ skills and make coaching sessions fun in less than 29 days! Download your free pdf guide at: Kids Soccer Drills.

In soccer training weight training soccer plays an important role in creating tougher and quicker muscles, this you might have heard a lot of times. Your players will have a chance to play at a higher level if they develop themselves using this soccer fitness plan discussed as follows.

The new theory of soccer weight training is to have strong and fast muscles with higher stamina rather that to keep on adding pounds of muscle bulk. Upper body weight training for soccer is not as important as is for the legs, but we still do it for overall conditioning and strength.

You should start your fitness training with the legs first. Begin with the squatting exercises. After a light warm-up set, load the bar to a weight you think your players can get 20 reps with. Supposing they are strong enough, so let them go with 220 pounds first. The technique is to get under the bar and standing up with it resting it across the upper back.

Instruct them to step back out of the racks and stand with their feet, shoulder width apart or wider. They must hold it as they go down until their hips are slightly lower than the top of their knees. When they reach this level in weight training soccer, they should stand up quickly and exhale. They should be motivated to do this for 20 reps even when they are totally worked out.

Soccer Fitness

A 5-10 minutes break should be taken before moving on with the leg curl machine to work on hamstrings. They are required to perform 4 sets of 15 reps each. They will be required to perform 4 sets of 15 reps on the Stiff-Legged Dead lift between each set of Leg Curl exercises. It is important for the hamstrings to be strong as the speed is significantly enhanced by them.

Then conclude your leg workout with 3 sets of 25 reps on the Standing calf-raise machine.

Now for the upper body work out begin with the Incline bench press.
When they are done with the warm ups, they should continue with extra weights so that the next set of 10 reps becomes tougher. They should continue with that weight for 5 sets of 10 repetitions total, while stretching their chest and shoulders, and resting for around 2 minutes between each set.

In this segment of soccer strength training the second exercise is the pull-ups. They should work out on their biceps and back by making their palms facing their body. Finally the upper body exercises include abdominals and performing 5 sets of 20 or more reps of leg raises. Conclude with 5 sets of 50 or more crunching exercises.

We would say in the end that to make quality players of soccer, weight training soccer is only a small fragment of the entire training program. To know more about various weight training exercises relevant to the game of soccer, subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community that has videos, articles, pod casts, and newsletters available for you.

Andre Botelho is known online as “The Expert Youth Soccer Coach” and his free ebooks and reports have been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Learn how to skyrocket your players’ skills and make practice sessions fun in record time. Download your free ebook at: Soccer Practice.