One of the great things about the sport of soccer is all the things you can do to excel at the game without being the biggest, strongest, or fastest player on the pitch.
All true.
You can check all those things out in this episode of The Soccer Specialist Podcast: How To Become An Elite Soccer Player <== (Without Being The Biggest, Strongest, or Fastest Player On The Pitch)
It really is a must listen.
That being said, all else being equal, speed is a game changer! The sports cliche “speed kills” really is true and soccer is no different.
With improved speed you can:
- Win more of the 50/50 balls.
- It’s easier get in behind defenses with your off the ball runs.
- You can break down a defense out wide to play dangerous crosses.
- When a defender knows you have superior speed, they will back off, which gives you more time and space to make a good decision.
- As a defender you can erase mistakes by quickly closing on the opponent to stop transitional attacks.
Here’s the good news.
Speed can be taught! Don’t listen to the crazy people that say it can’t. With proper training you can increase your speed.
How To Get Faster For Soccer And
Become A Speed Freak!
Improved Running Mechanics (Technique)
First, you can do so by improving your mechanics. Most people are not natural sprinters and sprint mechanics matter. Better sprint mechanics equals more speed.
So yes, practicing the skill of sprinting will help you sprint faster.
Strength Training For Soccer To Improve Speed
The other way you can improve your speed is by improving your strength. Hard work on a properly designed strength training program
If you’re willing to put in the work, soccer speed can be improved. If someone, especially a coach or trainer, ever tells you “you can’t teach speed”, run away!
There you go. You just learned:
How To Increase Speed For Soccer In 2 Simple Steps
Easy enough, right? Okay, maybe not easy but it can be done.
Most coaches never focus on running or sprinting form. Instead they run sprints to magically make players faster. Yet, technique is crucial.
We don’t tell players to shoot or pass the ball without instructing them on how to do it, right?
Strength and speed are linked. All else being equal, a stronger sprinter is a faster sprinter.
Many studies have shown this to be true such as a study in Strength and Conditioning Journal (1) that tested a group of college football players.
This study discovered that the players that were stronger (had a greater max weight on the squat) relative to their body weight, also tended to have faster sprint times in the 40 (a common sprint for athletes).
It’s important to understand that it won’t be easy or immediate. Adding 20 pounds to your barbell squat isn’t going to do much. Adding 75, 100 pounds, well now we’re getting somewhere!
There are two key components of strength training to improve your sprint performance.
You must center the program around the muscle groups responsible for sprinting. Yeah, I know. Duh!
And you must attack the weights.
As I said, a 20 pound squat improvement isn’t going to get the job done.
Strength Training For Soccer
Muscle Groups For Speed Training
-
Legs and Hips
Sure, this one is obvious. Well, the hips might not be. Weak hip flexors are a problem for many and we’ll talk more about that below.
-
Upper Body
Yes, really. If you want to increase speed for soccer, the upper body, from the back to the arms, plays an important role.
The power generated by the hips and legs must pass through the back to the arms and hands. And there’s an old runner’s saying, “running starts in the hands.”
This makes a strong back just as important as strong legs. Besides the power transfer from legs to arms, it’s the back that keeps the body erect and in a mechanically correct sprinter’s position. This takes strength.
Workouts to get faster for soccer must include exercises for the entire body.
How To Get Faster For Soccer:
Get As Strong As Possible
This is the one and only goal of strength training. That’s it.
When it comes to strength training for soccer, we’re not worried about muscle fiber makeup such as fast twitch or slow twitch. It’s all about strength improvements.
Get significantly stronger and you will increase your speed for soccer matches.
Training The Ultimate Power Source: The Legs and Hips
- Full Back Squats
- Bulgarian Split Squats
- Lunges
These are the three main exercises we’ll be focusing on for the hips and legs.
Full Squats For Leg Strength
Every athlete that can physically squat, should squat. While there’s been a lot of misinformation over the years regarding the squat, it’s a good exercise.
The squat, when properly performed, is one of the best strength training exercises you can do for overall sports performance and does not cause knee problems.
In fact, the squat strengthens the knees…
When performed properly with good technique!
Squats with too much weight, done with poor form, well, that’s an entirely different issue. And an injury waiting to happen.
Some athletes might lack the flexibility for full squats initially. However, it will come over time with lots of squatting.
Going lower on the squat brings many more important muscles into play than performing a partial squat does. Which means you also get balanced development in terms of strength.
When you only perform partial squats, you neglect certain muscles of the legs. Because of this, muscle imbalances can develop over time.
We’ll address recovery and over training in another article (when it’s ready we’ll link to it here) but one of the reasons for so many non-contact injuries nowadays, such as hamstring pulls, is poor program design.
When there’s an imbalance in the muscles such as the quadriceps and hamstring, this is a recipe for an eventual injury.
If for some legitimate reason, you can’t perform the squat properly, you can substitute with the leg press. But if you can squat, you should squat.
Lunges
Lunges are a fantastic strength training exercise for the legs for a number of reasons.
Lunges force strength development from the weaker leg. Everyone has a dominate side.
When performing two limbed exercises like the squat or barbell bench press, many times the dominate side takes over when it gets tough and you don’t even realize it’s happening.
By using single-limb movements like the lunge, you can help fix this muscle imbalance.
Forcing the weaker leg to do more in terms of adding reps, will improve overall performance.
Bulgarian Split Squats
Bulgarian split squats provide a different movement pattern than lunges, allowing you to take each leg slightly deeper in the range of motion.
It’s sort of between a lunge and a squat.
These exercises need to be worked hard and heavy.
Here are some things to keep in mind.
Not all three exercises need to be trained at every workout.
Heavy is a relative term. What is heavy for one person, may be too heavy or not heavy enough for another.
In this context, we are talking about limiting our reps per set to the lower ranges.
But heavy and lower reps doesn’t mean cranking out sets of max singles with bad form and forced reps.
We also don’t need 15, 20, or 25 rep sets while training for strength (there are a few exceptions noted below).
However, you do need to start light. Good technique is really important for two reasons.
One is injury prevention.
You are training to improve your soccer performance. You can’t do that if you get injured.
Good technique is also important to ensure you are training the correct muscles. Poor technique can take the stress off the muscles you are trying to grow stronger, which will limit your performance gains.
Training The Back For Strength
Without balanced strength development for the back, there will be an inefficient power transfer from the hips and legs, which will impede your speed. This means training the entire back with the correct exercises.
The back is a big, strong, complex muscle group so you’re going to need a number of different exercises for it.
A great exercise for the entire back is the power clean. While it’s a dynamic movement, it’s not too difficult to learn.
Some more great back exercises include:
- Deadlift
- (Almost) Stiff-Legged Deadlift
- One Arm Dumbbell Rows (Bench Supported)
- Shrugs
- Chin Ups
Like with the leg exercises, you aren’t going to do all of them every workout.
Be sure and include some hyperextensions as part of your warm up and/or at the end of your training session. Your lumbars need the attention. They usually get neglected compared to the abs. And hey, they help keep you upright while sprinting, so there’s that!
Abdominal Work For Increasing Soccer Speed
Yep. It’s true. The abs are important but training them doesn’t have to be complicated.
Sit ups and leg raises will get the job done. Remember, we’re talking about strength here.
You don’t need to do endless sets and reps in the hundreds. You can even add weights to your sit ups to keep your reps lower.
Strength Training For The Shoulder Girdle
This area isn’t as important as the others when it comes to strength training for speed, but it’s still important.
For starters, you don’t want to create a strength imbalance between the pulling muscles of the back and shoulders and the pushing muscles of the chest and shoulders (the shoulder has the front, side and rear with the front being more dominant in pushing exercises and the rear more dominant in pulling exercises).
So you’ll need to do some work for this area as well.
This means some form of pushing exercise such as the following:
- Bench Press and it’s variations (flat, incline, decline, barbell, dumbbell)
- Overhead Presses (seated, standing, barbell, dumbbell)
- Dips (known as the Upper Body Squat)
Remember the arms? This would be the bicep and the tricep.
Thanks to the back, chest and shoulder work, you don’t really need to do any direct work for the arms to improve your speed.
The bicep gets a lot of work from pulling exercises such as the power clean, dumbbell rows, and all forms of the chin up and pull up.
The tricep muscle gets a lot of work on all pushing exercises for the chest and shoulder and especially dips.
This brings us to one more crucial muscle that we haven’t discussed and that’s the calves. Obviously the strength of the calf muscles play a role in increasing sprinting speed so we need to work them.
The calves are very important in initiating every sprint, not to mention they help with the stabilization of the ankle. Ever tried playing soccer with unstable ankles?
The calves are also used every day, which makes them a stubborn body part to get to respond to training.
For the calves we’re going to forget about low reps. Sets for the calves should be in the 25 – 30 rep range.
Hit both seating and standing calf raises to be sure and develop both the soleus and gastrocnemius.
Does that seem like a lot for a strength training program? Don’t worry, it’s really not.
As I mentioned above, you are not going to do all these exercises in the same workout.
In addition, you don’t need to do a ton of high intensity sets for strength training, where you train to or beyond failure.
You also don’t need to train with as much frequency as you might if building muscle mass was your only goal.
While strength and muscle are related, they aren’t exactly the same. You can tweak your training to focus more on one or the other.
You can start out bare bones, which is simply one big exercise for each area.
A beginning strength workout for speed could be as follows:
Train twice per week
- Full Barbell Squat
- Power Clean
- Dip or Decline Bench Press
- Seated Calf Raise (alternate each workout with Standing Calf Raise)
- Hyperextensions
- Sit Ups
For the big three, it’s five sets of five reps per set with two minutes of rest between sets. The first two or three sets act like a built in warm up with the final two sets being hard.
If you can’t get 5 reps on the fifth and final set, don’t increase the weight at the next workout.
Start lighter than you might need to. It’s good to build momentum and be able to get all 5 reps on all 5 sets and increase the weight slightly each workout.
As you get stronger, your warm up may change a bit. You might use lighter weights for the first couple of sets and then the same weight for the last three “work” sets.
It might look like this:
-
135×5
185×5
215×5
215×5
215×5
If you get really strong, you might have one more increase with the final two sets being the “work” sets.
Like this:
-
135×5
185×5
215×5
235×5
235×5
With regard to the calf raises, hit 2 sets of 25 – 30 reps per set. You can do the same with the hyperextensions and the sit ups.
After developing good technique and a good base of strength, you can change up some exercises. Keep in mind, if you’re doing well, you don’t have to make changes.
Put in the work, apply yourself, add weight over time, and you’ll get stronger. Then it becomes a matter of transferring that new found strength to your speed performance on the soccer pitch.
They say you can’t teach speed but we know that’s a lie. Sure, no matter how I trained, Usain Bolt would finish the 100 meter sprint before I got finished the first 10 meters but that’s not the point.
The point is that I could increase my speed. Just like you can increase yours. You may never be the fastest player on the soccer pitch, but you can be a faster player than you are now.
This is because running, and maybe more appropriately in soccer, sprinting, is a skill. There are mechanics involved in proper sprinting.
There is technique, just like there is technique for dribbling, passing and shooting. It can all be improved.
Sure, we can all run. It doesn’t mean we all run with proper technique. We can all “play” soccer, too! Or sing! But some have better technique. And you really don’t want to hear me sing.
All movement depends on strength.
If you want to know how to get faster for soccer, it’s simple.
You need to do two things.
- Get Stronger By Using Strength Training For Soccer
- Improve Your Sprinting Mechanics
Do these two things and you will increase your speed for soccer.
We’ll go into a couple other areas of how to get faster in future articles, such as plyometrics and speed mechanics. We’ll also go into how you can help younger players get stronger if they aren’t ready for weights.
For more in-depth information on soccer strength training <<== check out this article
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References:
1. (Brechue, William & Mayhew, Jerry. (2012). Lower-Body Work Capacity and One-Repetition Maximum Squat Prediction in College Football Players. Journal of strength and conditioning research / National Strength & Conditioning Association. 26. 364-72. 10.1519/JSC.0b013e318225eee3.
