Soccer Weight Training

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Greg Koenig, owner of Fitness for Life and today we are going to discuss weight training for soccer. There are a variety of different moves that you can do to strengthen the muscles engaged in soccer. If you notice most soccer players have very strong athletic legs and that is due to the fact that they are in a lot of diverse plays, lateral running, forwards, backwards, so the legs are really fully developed because of all the range of motion that they have on the field. When you are training you want to simulate something a little more progressive than what they would actually do so it is almost a sense of progressive training to where you are working them a little stronger than they would to make them faster on the field. Speed is of major importance in soccer. A few movements that we like to do are explosive dumbbell squats. Soccer is a fast paced sport so you want to mainly focus on fast paced activities promoting more fast twitched fiber. If you train slow you will be slow so we want to do very dynamic ballistic fast acting movements. Today we are going to demonstrate a band resistance in what I call four way runs. Hunter is going to demonstrate the four way runs and we are confined as far as space goes so it is going to be a little bit abbreviated. We are going to start with the lateral runs and then we will go forwards and then backwards and we are going to start now for a 10 count and begin. You can see all the resistance coming to the left. He is really fighting and relax it and now I'm going to shift behind you and go forward, begin. The resistance providing is giving him a sense of overload, progressive overload all muscles and relax it. We go lateral again and then we'll go backwards. To the right, everybody has a dominant side so you really want to focus a little more on the weaker side. Really big on the hip flexors, quadricep, inner and outer thigh, calves and gluts. And relax it. Now we'll face me and we'll do the backwards, drive those legs, knees high, here we go. Fast pace, lean back, continue back up and relax it. This is Greg Koenig with Fitness for Life and this concludes weight training for soccer players."