Soccer Speed Training: The Basics

How do you successfully improve your soccer speed?

This question has been asked a million times, by a million soccer players, teams, AND coaches. When you visit another football team, one of the big questions is:“How do YOU train?“

What do you do?Sprint-Training?Plyometrics?Agility Drills?Just play the game of football?

To improve speed for soccer, one has to understand the physiological basis for speed and power.That basis is strength.

It‘s simple:To get faster you must first get stronger.That doesn‘t mean to say that you shouldn‘t do Speed-(read: Sprinting)and Power-Work; you should.

Power/Explosiveness for example, is basically a function of Strength x Speed.If you sprint you get faster. If you do explosive work you get faster..... up to a certain point, and then things plateau out, progress stalls.

To further improve, strength needs to be increased. Then one can get back to speed and power-work.

Another important tip:Emphasize that which gives the most return for time and effort invested, ie.: focus your soccer-specific training on that which is most improvable.Strength is many many times more improvable than pure speed.What that means in real world terms is: mainly work on strength, with the right kind of speed and power-work injected at the right time and place, and in the right amounts.

That way your power, speed and quickness will continue to improve, and so will your game.

Success in football/soccer is determined by many things, one of them is to be there first!Quote Al Vermeil of the Chicago Bulls:„It‘s basically all about who gets there the fastest, and under controll.“

This article was take from the Premier Soccer-Site:

Champions Soccer Training.com

Fat Burning Fun

"Work Hard, Play hard." Sounds about right, but what if you could combine both into one? In other words, simply make the work, in this case the training, into Play?

How cool is that? Super-cool, and it's real easy to do: no sweat !;-)

You gotta have fun in life, that‘s for sure. And if you can make training fun, too,(and you definitely can)you might as well do it !;-)

Weight loss and training in general are such drab, serious affairs... sometimes, maybe when you‘re getting in shape for an important front cover photo-shoot or something of that kind, you might need to „get serious“ for a while.

Outside of that though, it‘s definitely possible and recommendable to still have a life when burning fat: enjoy yourself, have a good time, live the life and yet get into super-shape.

Surfers are a great example:

These guys are in a good shape!

Theirs is a fairly high intensity sport: pretty hard, high level activity, done interval-style.

Sound familiar?

And I personally don‘t think you see too many surfers bring their post-workout-shake bottles to the beach, taking a sip of carbohydrate/protein solution in between waves !;-)

No, they‘re just out there, having fun, having a a good time, not worrying about it!And usually they then just eat later on, when they remember that there is such a thing as food !;-)

Pretty much any kind of outdoors activity: fairly high level like surfing, playing a game of touch-football or soccer, hiking up a mountain, or even low-level stuff like walking:These will take care of fat burning for you automatically whilst not being scheduled training as such.

That is provided it's done at the right times/in the right circumstances. And what are those?

Well, I'm SO glad you asked me that, because...

It's very simple really: Just play in a fasted state; and presto !;-)

All the calories burned will come off off your belly instead of from doughnuts, cookies or cakes!;-)

It will be like a side-effect of the whole thing, you don‘t even need to think about it!

Another one: when you‘re having a good time, you tend to just totally forget about food anyways!

One mistake to avoid:

You really shouldn‘t listen to the food- and mainstream fitness-industries:

Don‘t let them make you believe you need to bring some sports-drink(aka:sugar-solution) or energy-bars(read:candy) to replace burned up energy, to restore, refuel the badly needed carbohydrate-stores, lalala.... yadayadayada.

This is just so much hog-wash.

For one thing, if you take some of these interestingly flavoured and colored sodas or candy bars, usually you do much more than simply restore burned up energy , normally this kinda thing results in a huge calorie surplus, actually.

People tend to unfortunately over-compensate, something that‘s real easy to do with these calorie–packed foods. They way over-estimate the amount of calories burned during fat burning and other exercise and then „replace“ them with about twice the amount... No exaggeration!

Also having for example a high sugar, chemical-laden beverage with a nice and sporty name does not do much to increase overall energy anyways, quite to the contrary:

It‘s not exactly a health food, and even might get you into trouble: hypoglycemia(dangerously low blood-sugar) comes to mind, especially when coupled with strenuous activity.

Apart from that, why restore the burned up calories anyways? That‘s the whole point, right?

To burn energy off –in the form of body fat- and to keep it off!

Secondly, the human body is an amazingly effective and efficient mechanism: to start with, you‘re sitting on at least 1600-2000 kcl‘s of immediately available high powered kcl‘s when carb-stores are full.

And then, when running on fat for fuel(read: actually burning body fat for energy)for most individuals the energy available goes into the 100‘s of 1000‘s of calories!! That's: Hundreds of Thousands!!

Replace burned-up energy? Yeah right !;-)

There‘s simply no need for that, you have more than enough. Even when you‘re really lean already, you just don‘t have to sweat that part of the equation... you're not likely to run out of available energy, no way!

Or as they say „down under“: Naaaw Wurries, Mate !(supposed to be a Aussie accent!;-)

This article was taken from the Premier Fat Burning Fun-Site: 

Hollywood-Look Fitness.com