Posts Tagged ‘fitness training’

Soccer Training Tips: 5 Things You Must Know

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

Let me ask you a simple question. Not following the Soccer training tips, most soccer coaches blindly design training programs for their players just to make up the numbers and simply go through the motions. Are you guilty of this?

Before planning your next training session, set some goals for the team. Establish what you wish to achieve from the training program and take the necessary steps to achieve your target.

With a view to add variety in your training program, add new and innovative soccer drills that are fun to perform. This will give the players a break from the dullness of performing repetitive drills day in and day out. You’ll see a noticeable improvement in your team’s performance once they start enjoying the training sessions.

Make your players understand the value of respecting and listening to you, their coach, no matter what their age or level at which they play. Valuing each other’s opinions and feelings creates a healthy environment for both players and the coach.

Soccer training tips

Soccer players get an edge over others when they are highly flexible. There are 3 types of flexibility.

Dynamic flexibility: This is known as the capacity of a player to perform quick movements within the full range motion in the joint, for instance; twisting from side to side.

Static active flexibility: This is the aptitude of a player to stretch a hard muscle by using the tension from within that muscle. Holding one leg out in front of you as high as possible is an example of this. Doing this your hamstring is stretched and as the hip flexors and quadriceps grip your leg up.

Static passive: It is the ability to hold a stretch using your body weight or some other external force. For example; imagine holding your leg out in front of you and resting it on a chair.

Now let’s advance towards the next stage in the line of soccer training tips. Here, you need to check if the kids are clad in appropriate clothes that suit the weather conditions.

Training for soccer should be followed by a fitness program that focuses only on those areas that need maximum help. Following are the factors that must be kept in mind when designing a training program like this.

Age of the player: With age, there is a decrease in the flexibility of soft tissues in the body that is directly related to the reduced range of movement, no matter what the gender. However, decrease in flexibility can be significantly slowed down if we keep active.

Gender: Girls show greater movement, no matter what their age.

Motion: It is natural for kids with an active lifestyle to showcase better soccer skills and a greater range of movement that the ones not so active on field.

Injury: Injuries also hinder the range of motion in a joint.

Pain: As the pain increases, flexibility decreases and results in muscle spasms. On the other hand, strength training does not affect flexibility if you are doing the exercises correctly and in full range of motion.

Heredity: How flexible is a player’s body depends upon a player’s genetics also.

What’s stopping you from incorporating these soccer training tips into your training program and make it more effective and productive? You can develop your coaching skills by subscribing to our youth soccer coaching community that has loads of articles, newsletters, and significant videos.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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 training tips

Weight Training Soccer: 5 Action Ideas To Get Started

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

You should know how true it is to work on your team’s Weight training soccer program, while they are being trained with weights. In case you are not giving much attention to it, you are losing lots of advantages of soccer-specific fitness.

Only some of the coaches understand soccer strength training correctly. A young soccer player of today should be a “complete athlete”.

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. They will not worry if it destroys their aerobic endurance levels or their quickness and flexibility.

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

In soccer, lower body strength is needed for kicking, jumping, tackling, twisting, and turning and also lays the foundation for great speed. Upper body strength, on the other hand, is needed for shielding the ball, and keeping the opponents off.

Three broad categories can be made to divide “strength” in weight training soccer.

Absolute or Maximum Strength: The highest level of power your muscles can exert in a single, quick motion. A player for example doing 250lbs leg press has mightier strength than another doing 200lbs only.

In soccer, good maximal strength is advantageous in holding off the opponents and defending the ball. Fundamentally it’s the foundation for muscular speed and power.

Muscular Power: Absolute strength and the speed of action both add up to produce power. A valuable power will be created that is “explosive power”, if you improve one of them without lowering the other.

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: The capability of a muscle group to carry out frequent and high-power actions. Strength endurance and power both are essential for soccer.

Therefore strength endurance should be given importance to in your soccer training programs. However if you don’t alter your training programs and continue with 3 sets of 8-12 reps each, your training programs will not reap much of productive results.

Your game is about to improve 10 folds if you just put a little time in planning your weight training soccer program correctly. You should consider joining our youth soccer coaching society for you can gain more from the reserve of soccer resources like articles, periodic newsletters, and videos at our youth soccer coaching community.

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: Coaching Youth Soccer

Soccer Training Tips: 4 Simple Steps To Improving Performance

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

As a coach, you must know the all important Soccer training tips with a view to instruct the kids while teaching them the game. As a result of it, you can conveniently include in your soccer drills practice sessions, these tips to be executed 4 to 5 times every week according to your game’s standard.

By teaching your players some important tips and techniques, you can help them better their performance. Following are the techniques;

Educate your kids to keep moving the ball with one or two touches: This is known as inter passing in a team setting. They should play the ball with speed and make crisp solid passes, whether it is a 3-meter or 20 meter pass.

Play the ball and keep travelling: Playing and moving encloses the basic idea behind making runs. But the important thing here is to make sure that these runs open up goal scoring opportunities and make spaces for the other team members.

Soccer Tryouts

Soccer skills are primarily aimed at developing kid’s ability to create goal scoring options. You can work well by setting up the defender here. Teach your players to close in the defender towards them, as if he or she is going to be able to catch the ball, then give it and go, advance into the open space to receive or return the pass.

Once your kids make a move to beat the opponent, tell them to change their pace. They should try to keep the ball moving as fast as they can and quickly attack the opponent. The moment they get a chance to break, they must even the score with a few accurate passes.

Teach your kids to retain the ball close to their feet when trying to control the ball: As one of the important soccer training tips, they should keep their head up and keep an eye on other player’s movements on the field. They should make sure to touch the ball at every step while dribbling the ball. This has the effect of having close control over the ball and improving a player’s ability to take away the ball from defenders.

Get the cross in: During the first part of the game, keep an eye on the goalkeeper and take shots on the goal. When the player knows that he/ she is going to run in between the spaces, the other members of the team should be aware of it. It is necessary for the young players to learn this type of communication to become better players.

When training for soccer, teach players to try and aim for the area flanked by the 6 and 18 yard boxes. This will push the goalkeeper to come out in an endeavor to get the ball. This will make the goal open and defenseless.

Continue to observe the ball: Constantly observe the movement of each and every player on the field. Train players in a way that they stick to the team’s strategy and tactics for the day.

Your goal? To start utilizing these soccer training tips in your daily practice matches so that it comes naturally to your players while they are on field. You can subscribe to our youth soccer coaching community and get your way to innumerable articles, videos, and periodic newsletters.

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: Soccer training tips

Weight Training Soccer: Winning Tactics For Coaches

Monday, July 5th, 2010

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. The soccer fitness plan discussed in this article will help you prepare your players for playing soccer at a higher level.

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.

I recommend you begin your fitness training with the legs. Start with squats. After a light warm-up set, load the bar to a weight you think your players can get 20 reps with. Let’s say they are pretty strong, so tell them to begin with 220 pounds. The technique is to get under the bar and standing up with it resting it across the upper back.

They should then get out of the stands and stand with their feet and shoulder width apart. After that they must lower their body while holding on to the bar till their hips are a little bit below the top of their knee. In weight training soccer, after coming to this point the players should quickly stand up fully and breathe out. The players must be encouraged to continue even when they are worn-out till they do 20 reps.

Youth Soccer Coaching

Next is working on hamstrings, but before that have a 5-10 minutes break. They are required to perform 4 sets of 15 reps each. The Stiff-Legged Dead lift with 4 sets of 15 reps should be completed between each set of Leg Curls. Since hamstrings are very important to a player’s speed, so you want them to be very strong.

The leg exercises will be completed with 3 sets of 25 reps on the Standing calf-raise machine.

Start the upper body workout with the Incline bench press.
Once the players have performed the warm ups, tell them to carry on by putting more weights such that the next set of 10 reps get harder. The players must repeat the 5 sets 10 times with weights, while stretching their chest and shoulders and at the end of each set stop and relax for 2 minutes.

Now we move to the second workout of this session of soccer strength training which are the pull-up exercises. Their palms must be facing their body so that they can exercise their biceps and back muscles. The final part of the upper body work out involves working on abdominals and doing 5 sets of 20 or more reps of leg raises. Conclude with 5 sets of 50 or more crunching exercises.

In conclusion, weight training soccer is only a small part of the overall training necessary to develop great soccer players. You are welcomed to our youth soccer coaching community coming up more information about various weight training exercises relevant to the game of soccer; it also has videos, articles, pod casts, and newsletters available for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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 training fun in record time. Download your free ebook at: Soccer Coaching Tips