Soccer Strength Training Types

Intro to soccer strength training

In the game of soccer you will need a pretty good lower body to kick, jump and to make explosive starts. However, you will also need good upper body strength for tackling, shielding, throw-ins etc.
In this article I will show you how strength training in soccer can help you with that. The strength training in soccer is divided into 3 broad categories and each of them serves its own purpose. Let’s start…

Max Strength
Good max strength is important for tackling, shielding, and hold off your opponent. Even more important, the max strength also forms the foundation of your speed and power. However, there is a caveat…

Your max strength should focus on your abdominals, lower back and trunk which all form your center of power. Every turn stop and start you perform is support by your core. Involving max strength training in your overall practice will surely increase your performance on the field.

Muscle Power
Your muscle power is a combination of max strength and the speed of your movement. Increasing one of these (of course without lowering the other one) will increase your explosive power.

Using weights is great for increasing your overall muscular power. However, you should be aware of this one because you don’t want to be a bodybuilder, you want muscles for soccer. One way of avoiding this is to use light weights with many reps.

Muscles are good, however you should not build to much of them as you may decrease your flexibility on the field.

Muscular or Strength Endurance
In soccer, muscular endurance is defined as; the ability of one or several muscle groups to perform repeated and high intensity movements. Your muscular endurance is crucial for your game and like power, it is maybe more essential then all out strength.

Training for your muscular endurance should be performed with light weights and many repetitions. To increase your strength power you can use circuit training (which is probably the most widely used method for soccer endurance).

This is a method where several exercise stations are performed consecutively. Many of the exercises involved in circuit training doesn’t even need any equipment (such as pushups, bench-steps, bench dips, crunches etc.

My experience is that soccer strength training is an important part of your overall soccer fitness. However, you should not focus on it rigorously because the game with the ball should still be your no 1 priority.

Focusing on it to much may decrease your skill with the ball and that is the last thing you want! You can see strength training as a piece of puzzle; It is necessary to have that piece, but it is not crucial.