Monday January 12, 2009 10:55

Soccer Fitness - How To Increase Your Endurance

Posted by The Soccer Blogger as Soccer Training & Skills

Your soccer fitness is an essential part of your overall soccer training regime and one of the most gruelling parts of playing soccer is the fact that you hardly ever have the opportunity to rest. As long as the ball is in play you are going to need to remain active and alert. Of course, like most ball and team sports, you do get the opportunity for a very quick rest after the ball has gone out of play or a goal is scored. Of course, there are two provisos to all that. Firstly, the break you are going to get will be very brief and it will almost feel like no break at all, it all happens so quickly. Secondly, neither team may actually score a goal.

Fortunately, even just a couple of weeks of work can help to quickly build up your endurance. Those two weeks can help you keep up with the constant pace of the game. Since the game itself is based upon your ability to constantly run over the course of a 90 minute game, it is your running skills that you are going to need to focus on. The average soccer player runs five to six miles during the course of a game at an average speed of four to six miles per hour. Now you may be thinking, “that doesn’t sound too bad?” If so, try it! I guarantee you’ll change your mind.

In order for you to be able to keep up with the pace of the game you are going to need to be capable of travelling five to six miles at a consistent pace and be fit enough to keep up with the start and stop nature of the game.

Of course, you don’t need to go out and start running six miles right away. If you are not used to that level of exercise you are only going to injure yourself, setting your training schedule back weeks. Instead, what you need to do is start slowly and progress until you are able to run the entire distance comfortably. The distance you should begin at depends upon your current level of soccer fitness and whether you are in pre or mid-season. Two miles is generally a good starting point; almost everyone, and that hopefully includes you, can run two miles at a gentle pace.

If you do not believe that you can run two miles or the thought of running for such a distance intimidates you try to break it up into smaller more achievable goals. For example, you could decide that you are going to run for twenty continuous minutes at a steady pace. This will probably still take you approximately two miles, but since you will be concentrating on the clock rather than on the distance you have travelled it will not feel as far. It’s all psychological. Bottom line is that you should do whatever makes you feel better.

The important thing when you are doing a timed jog is to remember that it doesn’t matter how fast you go just as long as you keep running. If you are moving at a slow jog that really isn’t getting you where you want to go any faster than a quick walk would, it’s okay but the point is, your legs are still moving in a jog-like manner. It is much harder to get started again once you have stopped than it is to make your legs keep moving, so you will be doing yourself no favours by stopping to walk, or stopping altogether to catch your breath. If you find that you truly cannot run for twenty minutes try a smaller increment, such as ten minutes, and work your way back up. It’s all about building your stamina up.

After you are comfortable with your two miles and / or twenty minutes it is time to extend your distance a little farther. It should take you no more than say two to three weeks to become accustomed to a particular distance; perhaps so much so that you are able to travel it with very little effort but certainly enough that you can stretch it just a little bit farther. Try adding on an extra mile or an extra five or ten minutes to your runs for two or three weeks, then another mile or five to ten minutes after that, and so on and so forth until you are able to run a full six miles or an hour consecutively without too much trouble.

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