Soccer Strength and Conditioning
How To Elevate Your Performance On The Pitch By Becoming Stronger, Faster and Better Conditioned
Proper strength training and conditioning are too often overlooked for soccer players (except most professional teams).
A good soccer strength and conditioning program should be part of your development plan even at younger ages while also working on becoming a smart, skilled soccer player.
In a study of 60 sports for various athletic categories, soccer was ranked as follows:
Speed – 8th
The only ones ranked above it are actual speed events (short races), such as speed skating, swimming, track & field sprints. Basketball and ice hockey are the only non-race sports ahead of it.
Endurance – 8th
Like speed, most of these are endurance races and the only non-race sport ahead of it is boxing.
Agility – 1st
‘Nuff said!
Analytic Ability – 1st
This is smarts people! This is soccer IQ!
Soccer is chess only complicated (sorry chess players) with 22 moving pieces and a ball.
Take out the races and soccer ranks:
-
#2 in endurance
#3 in speed to go along with its
#1 ranking in agility and (reaction, change of direction)
#1 in analytic ability
You can see how important proper endurance, speed, quickness and agility work is for soccer.
Strength and conditioning for soccer matters. It can be the difference between being elite and getting cut.
Sure, in the youth game you get to be subbed out. But other than that, it’s still a non-stop sport. No timeouts.
Even with out of bounds and free kicks, the game doesn’t stop.
Except on that rare occasion when the referee marks off ten yards on a free kick or something, the game doesn’t wait for a second whistle.
Or for the ref to hand the player a ball on a throw in. No four seconds of action followed by 40 seconds of nothing, like American football.
You may have just sprinted 60 yards only to see a teammate kick the ball out, but you can’t stop and take a deep breath because the other team may throw the ball in right away and you have defensive responsibilities.
It has amazed me how often I see good young players, who can’t keep up conditioning-wise, even for a five or ten minute stretch on the field.
They make one long sprint to the offensive third and can’t sprint back.
The US WNT loves to try and create breakaways this way in the offensive third by catching the other team trying to take a second to gather itself. No rest for the weary.
In a matter of minutes (or even seconds), there can be a number of sprints, all of varied lengths and intensity, without a chance to rest.
Not making the sprint could result in the other team scoring or a missed scoring opportunity for your own team.
During those sprints it’s quite likely you’re banging shoulders with a player on the other team.
Maybe they are tugging on your jersey, grabbing your arm, or pulling on your shoulder.
You have to have the strength to keep them at bay and get the job done. This takes upper body and core strength.
Unfortunately, even today, a lot of soccer strength and conditioning workouts are outdated. Most conditioning is endurance running and maybe some sprints at the end of a training session.
Usually if the coach is mad! Ha!
But soccer isn’t steady state endurance. It’s not even really the same length of sprint, repeated after a recovery period at the same speed.
There are a lot of aspects of soccer conditioning and strength training that are neglected by coaches, players and trainers.
Things like:
- Strength Training (both relative strength and strength endurance)
- Speed (not just top speed, but short distance explosiveness and power)
- Agility (and Reaction Time)
- Quickness
- Change of direction
- Flexibility
- Proper warm up, cool down and off day recover
- Nutrition <<== (you should really read this)
While other popular team sports like basketball, hockey and American football, for the most part, understand using a good strength and conditioning program, soccer still lags behind.
Most soccer coaches and players don’t seem to think it’s necessary, beyond running.
This is especially true when it comes to soccer strength training.
Most teams don’t even do any form of strength training for soccer.
Listen up players, this type of thinking will put you at a disadvantage on game day.
Conditioning in Soccer
It’s true that soccer players do a lot of running in a match so an aerobic base of fitness is needed. However, the kind of running varies greatly in intensity, duration and density.
So, while that aerobic base is needed, it is already (over) emphasized in the conditioning most soccer players do.
It’s not necessary, and even counter-productive for a soccer workout plan to be focused on long duration low intensity steady state cardio, such as 5 or 10 mile runs.
But this is what most players do when they want to “get fit” for their soccer season.
But is this really the best way to develop the different energy systems needed for a soccer match? Is it sport-specific enough to prepare players for the physical demands of a soccer match?
As mentioned above, soccer is not running around a field at the same pace and intensity for the entire match. There are many different demands on the body such as:
- Walking
- Jogging
- Sprints
- Running
All of this is being done for various distances, at various intensities, while including explosive change of direction at any time.
Players don’t get to sprint 40 yards and then relax and recover. They may have to follow that 40 yard sprint, with a 20 yard jog and then an explosive 5 yard sprint (with a change of direction), followed by a 60 yard sprint back to prevent a goal.
The combinations of distance, intensity, and change of direction are limitless and a soccer player has to be prepared for all of it. This is what soccer conditioning workouts can’t just be about endurance runs.
In order to prepare for the physical demands of a soccer match, players need to implement high intensity interval training into their strength and conditioning program.
This will be much more effective in helping them meet the requirements needed to excel on the pitch.
Soccer conditioning drills that incorporate high intensity interval training can also work on agility and dribbling skills (if done with correct technique).
Here’s a drill from one of the soccer conditioning workouts in my #1 Amazon best-selling book, Dominate Game Day – The 4 Week Soccer Conditioning Blueprint You Need To Become An Elite Soccer Player.
You can get it on Amazon both for the Kindle and in Paperback as well.
This one can be done with or without a ball.
You can get all the conditioning work you need, including agility, speed and change of direction, while also get thousands of touches on the ball.
Strength Training For Soccer
While strength training seems to get neglected in soccer, a well designed strength program can benefit all athletes, including soccer players.
Strength is used in every single movement and makes every other aspect of a sport easier.
Think about it; even getting up out of a chair takes strength and the stronger you are, the easier it is.
This is one reason people struggle to get out of chairs as they age!
If they aren’t doing some type of strength training as they get older, they are losing strength and this makes every day activities, such as getting out of a chair, more difficult.
Soccer players also need speed and power to succeed.
While overall conditioning is important, most of the times in soccer, it’s a lot more important to be ‘faster’ or ‘quicker’ over ten or fifteen yards than it is to be faster over 50 or 60 yards.
Two elements that are needed to be faster over shorter distances are power and speed (duh!). Both of them are related to strength.
Mechanics also play a huge role but that’s another article!
It’s not just to be faster or more explosive in terms of sprinting, accelerating and changing direction, but strength is necessary to win the battles in the air as well.
In the modern game you need to have good upper body strength, as well as core strength, in order to knock players off the ball, or to make sure you don’t get knocked off the ball.
Being stronger gives soccer players a lot of advantages and many other benefits as well.
A properly designed strength training program for soccer:
-
Helps players get leaner and improve body composition which will help performance.
Improves a player’s explosiveness for quicker changes of direction, better acceleration, increased speeds over short distances, and a better vertical jump to win balls in the air.
Can make players less likely to be injured.
Develops a faster, more efficient metabolism.
Gives a player more energy (proper nutrition plays a huge role here as well).
Soccer players don’t need the strength of athletes in more strength dominated sports like American football.
A 350 pound bench isn’t going to matter to a midfielder the way it will to an offensive lineman protecting their $30 million dollar quarterback’s blind side.
But it’s still important for the many reasons mentioned.
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Inside The Soccer Speed Report You’ll Discover:
And plenty more!
For soccer players, being lean and having a good body composition is important for performance.
This means that relative strength should be the focus, not absolute strength. With absolute strength, extra body weight, in the form of fat, can actually be beneficial to improve your numbers.
But soccer players don’t want to carry unnecessary weight in the form of fat.
With proper training, strength can be improved significantly without adding extra weight. If you don’t believe this, just look at weightlifters and powerlifters, who perform in weight classes.
You can get stronger without adding body weight. This should be the focus of most soccer players. That being said, of course there are some players who could increase their performance by adding five or ten pounds of lean muscle to their frames.
The focus of a strength training program should not be complicated, in terms of exercise selection. You don’t need a whole bunch of fancy equipment of a variety of machines.
It’s important to focus on the big compound movements and not the isolation exercises.
This means exercises like:
- Squats
- Lunges
- Deadlifts
- Dips
- Pull-ups
- Chin-ups
- Rows
- Push-ups (and bench press)
- Shoulder Presses
There are plenty of variations of these exercises as well. Just the squat alone has barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, body weight, or sandbag.
Not to mention varying the stance, as well as changing the tempo of the reps or doing jump squats, split squats or Bulgarian split squats! Yep, it can get crazy!
Avoid isolation and most machine exercises like:
- Leg Extensions
- Leg Curls
- Bicep Curls
- Lateral Raises
Functional free weight and body weight exercises should be the focus of your strength training.
This means equipment like:
- Barbells
- Dumbbells
- Kettlebells
- Sandbags
- Body Weight (for exercises like pull-ups, chin-ups push-ups, explosive movements like jump squats, and dips)
Focus on full body training with exercises that hit the major muscle groups while training for relative strength gains, not muscle.
Again, some soccer players may benefit from adding some muscle in the off season and maintaining it during the season.
This would slightly alter the design of the workout. Sets, reps, frequency and intensity parameters would change to focus more on muscle building over strength training.
Soccer Speed and Agility Training
A soccer player must have a degree of speed and agility in order to perform optimally on the pitch.
It’s true that soccer allows players who aren’t the biggest, strongest, or fastest to excel at the sport. Just check out some of my podcast episodes.
You’ll find a lot of things a soccer player can do to become great that have nothing to do with physical ability such as speed.
That being said, speed and agility are big components of soccer. The good news is, those things can be improved. Yes, even speed.
First, mechanics can be improved.
Second, speed can also be improved through increasing strength.
In fact, soccer speed can be impacted a lot by mechanics and strength because strength can increase power. Even more so than for a track sprinter who does the 100 or 200 meter.
Why?
Because, while all out sprints over longer distances of 60, 70 yards or more do happen occasionally, most sprints in soccer are much shorter than that.
Short sprints are impacted more by explosiveness (strength, power), acceleration, and mechanics, than longer sprints.
A player who is faster over shorter distances, all else being equal, will have an advantage over a player that is faster over 60 or more yards.
In other words, your time over 10, 20, 30 yards is more important than your time over 60, 70, 80 yards when it comes to soccer.
Does it matter if you have a great 100 time if you can’t beat your opponent to a 50/50 ball over a short distance, such as 5 or 10 yards?
What About Agility?
Don’t be fooled by what you see in terms of agility training.
Yes, the speed and agility ladders, speed hurdles and cones all look great when laid out in some fancy professional looking pattern on the field and players are racing through them.
And yes, they most certainly play a role in agility training. But understand that true agility involves a reactive component.
A running back may look great doing agility ladder drills but if he can’t react, cut and change direction to get out of the way of tacklers, he’s not going to be much of a running back.
So while typical agility work has its place in a soccer strength and conditioning program, it’s important to add some reactive drills as well.
Power, as it’s typically defined, is the result of strength and speed.
For example, let’s say someone can bench press 200 pounds one time and it takes 6 seconds. Another player can bench press 200 pounds one time as well, but they can do it in 4 seconds.
If the distance traveled is the same, the second player is more powerful, or explosive.
To help increase power, and thus speed, a good strength training program should include some explosive work as well.
This means things like body weight jump squats, body weight jump lunges and other movements such as box jumps or one leg broad jumps (repeated continuously over a distance, such as 10 or 20 yards).
To excel in soccer, explosive sprints need to be performed over and over again, so there is also an endurance component as well.
This is why there should be a focus on high intensity interval training as part of any soccer conditioning workout.
A Good Warm Up Matters and Flexibility Does, Too!
It amazes me, and not in a good way, the lack of flexibility I have seen in young soccer players.
Not to mention the fact that many 12 and 13 year olds can’t control their body enough to do a simple body weight squat or bear crawl.
It also drives me crazy, in this day and age, to see players performing static stretching as the first thing they do to warm up (or the only thing).
The best way to warm up, while also working on improving flexibility, is to perform a dynamic warm up.
A Good Dynamic Warm Up Includes Movements Like:
- High Knees
- Hip Circles (In to Out and Out to In)
- Butt Kicks
- Body Weight Squats
- Walking Lunges
- Leg Swings (side to side and front to back)
- Arm Circles
- And more
Soccer Nutrition
So much of strength and conditioning, as well as training and game performance hinges on good nutrition.
Check out the ultimate guide to soccer nutrition <<==
Soccer Strength And Conditioning Program
A strength training program does not have to be more than one or two days per week.
Even in the off season, strength does not need to be trained more than twice per week. This allows time for conditioning work, speed and agility training and actual time with the soccer ball.
Keep it simple. For younger ages, stick with simple body weight exercises. For the older players, here’s a very simple strength training program you can follow in the off season.
For this particular workout:
You’ll perform 5 sets of 5 reps. Rest two minutes between sets.
The first two sets use a lighter weight. The last three sets will include the same weight.
If you can’t do more than 5 reps on the third and fourth sets, the weight is too heavy. Yes, you’ll only do 5 reps but you should be able to get more.
If you can’t get 5 reps on the fifth and final set, keep the weight the same at the next workout. If you get 5 reps on that final set, add a little weight at the next workout.
If you start using some serious weight, you may need another warm up set or two with a lighter weight.
Remember, you’re working on strength. It’s not necessary to do super high intensity or high rep death march sets.
Monday
-
Barbell Squats
One Arm Dumbbell Rows
Barbell (or Dumbbell) Bench Press
Seated Shoulder Press
Friday
-
Barbell Deadlift
Dumbbell Lunges
Chin-Ups
Dips (or Push-Ups)
You could perform explosive movements, such as kettlebell swings or jump squats on Wednesday if your schedule allows.
If not, you can substitute some explosive work on Friday and take out the lunges and dips.
This is one good example to get you started. Many factors come into play when designing soccer strength and conditioning workouts, such as other activities or training.
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