Athletes in Isolation - Soccer

Athletes in Isolation #2

(5min read)

As an athlete your priority should be to return to competition ready for the demands of the sport as soon as you start.

With that said, let's look at how we can maintain fitness and ease back into competition with preparation.

Both strength and fitness qualities need to be maintained. We are afforded the luxury during this "off-season" to train harder and generate more fatigue.

Soccer can be considered to be a "well-rounded" sport in that it requires multiple fitness qualities to be attained at high levels. General strength and fitness will be our starting point, and from there we will build levels of power, speed, agility and endurance. We must also be careful as to our power to weight ratio. Simply this means that the more weight we carry, the more our muscles have to work to run, sprint, jump, etc. Obviously fat mass doesn't help us here at all since fat doesn't contribute to our output. The more fat mass we can reduce the better (within reasonable standards). Perhaps less obviously, too much muscle can also be of determent. We need to have a strong and powerful muscle, but power doesn't correlate directly to size of muscle. In short, we need to worry less about size of muscles and rather the power and capacity of said muscles - during our general strength phase...

General strength should be priority #1 during the next few months. General strength will assist in the development of other qualities later on. This can be achieved through high volume, high intensity and low-moderate weight training. This involves 10-20 sets of 8-15reps and per muscle, per week (exercises to be performed for longer than 40secs). Choosing 2 compound movements and 1-2 isolation movements per muscle is good for ensuring adequate muscle development. If you feel you're maximum speed and/or acceleration is slow or worry that your lean muscle weight might be slowing you down, drop the reps, sets and change the weight to a mode closer to 5-10 sets of 5 reps with higher loads.

Power development can also be added but should be reserved primarily for 1 month out from comp. Make sure you add your "power" work at the start of each session and limit it to 1-2 exercises per day. Exercises specific to soccer should include squats, box jumps, dead-lifts and clean and press (at home you can use wheelbarrows, shopping bags and gym bags filled with weights to emulate weights at the gym). Power development for soccer specific training will involve 5-8 sets of <5 reps with a load of ~60% maximum weight. The idea of this phase is to focus on “speed" and moving the weight as quick as you can! You should also consider doing specific speed training (in replacement for your power training) once every 3-4 weeks and more frequently as comp approaches. Sled drags or weighted sprints work very week for this.

As for fitness qualities, it's important to maintain aerobic or "long distance" conditioning. Soccer players can run up to 11-12km during a match so this is ideally what you should be aiming for each running/conditioning session. Players spend 2/3rd's of their time jogging and the other 1/3rd jogging fast and maximally sprinting for distances no longer than 40m at a time. Emulate this in your training as best as possible. Run for 10-15km and break into a 40m dash every 1.5-2min.

Depending on how untrained you are now, you might need to start with 2-3km runs, but as the competition approaches, this mode and intensity of training will be what you're aiming for

While doing this type of training you can also be developing your tactical skills on the field: dribbling a ball, changing direction, ladder drills and so on. As competition approach, make sure you implement some speed work. This can be achieved through short distance, high intensity runs (20 meters) utilising weighted instruments and/or sled drags.