Football Specific Conditioning
There are a lot of misconceptions about how to increase stamina and fitness in football players. To be most effective your training should resemble the demands of your sport. Heading out for a casual run seems like the best way to increase your cardiovascular fitness but by no means is it the best bang for your buck. Football is unique in it’s demands and on average a player will spend 25% of their time walking, 37% jogging, 20% submaximal running, 11% sprinting and 7% moving backwards with an average distance of between 11-14km covered in a 90 minute game. Just heading out for a 10km run at a solid pace on the streets just isn’t going to cut it when during a game you might be required to sprint 10m then turn and sprint 30m then jog 20m then turn and sprint again.
Multi-directional nature of Football
The number of different movement patterns that a top class player will use during a game is well over 100 and between 70-90 for amateur to sub-elite players. These movement patterns include:
Change in direction
Change in pace
Jumping/Landing
Change in footwork
Research has shown that players change movement pattern over 11 times every minute. This puts huge demands on the ankle, knee and hip joints and is no wonder there tends to be so many knee and ankle injuries in footballers. These demands means its imperative that you appreciate the importance of conditioning these joints and the supporting muscles which hold the joints to withstand these demands.
Running in a straight line just won’t achieve that result. It’s also going to take more than running to achieve the strengthening and preparation of your joints and muscles for a game situation, this is where your strength training really pays dividends.
4 Key Movements:
There are 4 key movement elements that you make on the pitch of which all need to be considered when doing conditioning:
Most runs you make are between 5-30m with the most common distance being 10m which might seem quite short but doing 100m repeated sprint efforts to improve your speed for football just isn’t going to be effective. It is not about top speed it is about acceleration of the mark.
Runs are usually made without the ball, although ball contact often occurs at the beginning or end of a run. Depending on your position, on average you’ll make a 2-3second all out sprint about once every 90 seconds and making/receiving passes about 30 times during a match. Although i mentioned above about total distance covered being between 10-14km it doesn’t give a true indication of the amount of work load being placed on the player. When we look at average distance covered at sub-maximal and maximal speed (i.e. sprinting), the number of accelerations/decelerations and changes in direction we begin to see the true load requirements.
Movements involve turning, cutting, dodging, weaving, jumping, landing, accelerating from stationary or near/stationary and decelerating. You can make over 1000 changes of direction in all planes of movement over the course of a match!
Exercise intensity during a game can range from walking to jogging to sprinting all in the space of a couple minutes and then be repeated over and over for 90 minutes.
These movements are all required to be performed at high speed and with power over the duration of the match. Your training needs to address all of these demands for you to optimise your performance on the pitch. It’s not enough to just have good cardiovascular fitness to be able to last for 90 minutes. This is why it’s much more important to train for the pace of a game, rather than the length. Hopefully you’re starting to see why going for a run might not be the best way to spend your time.
Energy Systems and Fibre Types:
As i’ve mentioned, during a game you will be exercising at a variety of different intensities. This means you’ll be using all three energy systems: ATP-PCr system (very high intensity), anaerobic system (high intensity), and aerobic system (low intensity). During a game you need to be able to perform well within all three systems, when you go out for a run you’ll primarily use your aerobic system and thus the carry over to a football game is very limited.
There are two main types of muscle fibres: type 1 (slow-twitch) and type 2 (fast-twitch). Slow-twitch muscle fibres contract at a slower speed. They're used in endurance activities, like going for a long run at a steady pace. Fast-twitch muscle fibres on the other hand contract quickly and provide explosive power to be able to move quickly. To be able to keep up with the demands in a game you have to be able to effectively use type 2 muscle fibres, which won’t be improved by going for a long-distance run.
Genetically, every player has different levels of slow and fast twitch muscle fibres, if you consider yourself quite a quick player then it’s likely that you’re made up of predominately fast twitch fibres or you are successfully recruiting these fibres to be able to perform explosive movements. If you’re lacking pace however you can become faster with the right training.
Recovery and the amount of training you do:
Increased fitness = performance - fatigue. By decreasing fatigue, performance doesn’t even have to change to have transient improvements in fitness. And the way to decrease fatigue is to monitor and manage your training loads. More is not always better! A sudden increased training load is almost always a recipe for disaster and is where a lot of injuries can and will occur. We will address overtraining and monitoring training loads in another blog article but as a snippet when we say more is not always better we refer to the time spent in a single training session, total training sessions in a day and total trainings/games in a week. It might seem like a great idea to train twice a day for 2 hours each 6 days a week and play 1 game a week but the truth is our bodies just aren’t equipped to handle that especially if we are expected to train at high intensities.
Your Work:Rest ratio is the most important factor in your training. This is where we can manipulate your loading within your training sessions to elicit different and desired results and work the different energy systems and recruit the different muscle fibres when we want to and need to. As an example, if we’re looking to do a true speed (acceleration 0-30m) session to increase recruitment of fast twitch motor units i would use a work:rest ratio of 1:4 or even 1:5. The movement is designed to be maximal output so if we want the athlete to produce that same maximal output over and over we need to give them ample recovery time to be able to do that. However, if we were looking at loading the ATP-PCr and Anaerobic energy systems we would use a lower work:rest ratio over a slightly longer distance. We might aim to do high velocity running (not maximal sprinting) over 30-60m distances with a 1:2, 1:1 or 2:1 work:rest ratio. The above should be worked into team training sessions and individual trainings. Both of these examples are extremely taxing on the body and are used as a form of injury prevention as well but adequate recovery following the session is an absolute must if we then expect the player to either turn around and do weights session in the afternoon or a team training the following day. We will go into depth about different recovery protocols and modalities in a seperate blog article.
Take home message? TRAIN SMART! Train for your game, for the pace of the game and not for the duration of the game. You’re a footballer not a marathon runner so train like one!
Any questions or more information don’t hesitate to contact us.