Strength Training Tips to Improve Soccer Performance
Soccer requires a balance of skill and athleticism to succeed. These tips should help you improve your athleticism and take your game to a new level. This is part one is a multi part article series.
Lift weights to get strong – Lifting weights to get strong has so many benefits. We don’t live in the 1920s anymore. At one time people believed the world was flat. At another time they thought weight lifting would make you slow. Neither of them turned out to be true.
By now some of you have probably shifted to modern thinking while some of you possibly still hold your soccer players back by not having them lift at all. Or maybe you just have them lift incorrectly. Bottom line is that you should lift to get your soccer players strong and you should periodize the workouts. For beginners a linear periodization will work. This means just add weight little weight each week or so. Eventually this will not work anymore and you will not be able to linearly progress in weights. Down the road you can go with more of an undulating periodization scheme.
Lift weights like the body is meant to move- Don’t train your players like bodybuilders. Bodybuilders will sometimes (not always) train muscles in isolation. Let’s say one day you go to the gym and saw this bodybuilder performing an exercise you thought was really cool. So you start to mimic that exercise in your workouts. The problem is the exercise works over just one joint and isolates a single muscle. On the other hand a better exercise that will give you more bang for your buck would work over two joints and develop multiple muscles in one exercise. You kill two birds with one stone.
The other draw back to a bodybuilding program is in my opinion, you build size but you lack functionality. This means you get big but probably wont be fast or agile as you should be. You now have all this extra weight weighing you down making you a bit slower compared to someone that lifted really heavy and got really strong.
In the next article Ill explain the concept of one joint vs two joints a little more. I'll provide a list of exercises that are one joint and then provide the better exercise that will work over two joints and give you more bang for your buck.
