Soccer Adviser

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How To Get Better At Soccer By Yourself: Soccer Training Tips

How To Get Better At Soccer By Yourself Soccer Training Tips

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If you have stumbled across this post, chances are you are a young soccer player hoping to learn how to get better at soccer by yourself. Whether you are on a team and playing for a club already or hoping to get scouted and eventually play college or professional soccer, you will need to continue to improve your skills in your own time.

This post will help you do just that. It is a detailed guide to improving your capabilities as a soccer player.

By the end of this post, you will have learnt how to increase the following:

Your speed.
Your acceleration.
Your agility.
Your balance.

And the most vital, your strength.

There are three main ways for you to practice skyrocketing your speed: 

  1. Improving running technique
  2. Improving strategy
  3. Reinforcing your legs

Most players do not have excellent running technique, and if they solely worked on improving their strategy, they’d unlock their running potential and become a lot faster on the pitch.

Leg strength is significant here as your legs are your foundation – they need to be robust and sturdy for overall balance and speed. The more force applied to the ground, the speedier you can run.

The bottom line is, you cannot reach your full speed potential by just running or sprinting during training. Several elements must coincide with one another if you would like to reach your top speed potential. 

From a systematic perspective, speed is the by-product of 2 elements:

Stride length and stride frequency.

Stride length is the distance you cover during every step of your run.

Stride frequency is essentially the number of steps you take per second.

By employing the following training strategies, you can boost your stride length and frequency; thus, increasing your speed.

But if you want exclusive Soccer Training Videos covering Nutrition, Mindset, Strength, Speed, Conditioning, & Technical Drills then check out this soccer training program: Building The Complete Soccer Athlete: Train Like A Pro

No more excuses!

Get Better At Soccer By Yourself, By Adding This To Your Training Routine.

Training Warm-up: Sprint, Reverse, Repeat.

From your preferred start position, run 10-15 yards and then run backwards to your beginning position, repeat.

Soccer Plyometrics & Agility Training: 

Use this drill once each week and do not use on days before your big game, since this circuit may take two or more days recovery. 

Speed and acceleration go hand in hand. 

To enhance your acceleration, repeated high-intensity sprints of 10-15 seconds, performed from a standing start will be most handy. HIIT training techniques like this, require huge bursts of energy followed by a rest period of 60-90 seconds.

You would do this at least 20 times or work your way up to 20 times with practice. This could help to improve the neuromuscular and metabolic qualities of the muscles concerned. 

Another way of improving acceleration is to work on increasing as quickly as possible during practice.

A slow acceleration topped with a fast burst is another useful technique that you may use. 

One of the best resources you can train with to extend acceleration is an agility ladder. Agility ladder drills are best used for (yep, you guessed it…) upping your agility!

15 Agility Ladder Exercises

In sports competition, the body is consistently required to perform quick micro-movements from unusual angles. So, the agility ladder’s primary purpose is to plug a good range of different foot and movement patterns.

Through training, these movements will eventually become second nature, as it puts the body in a position to respond to the varied angles needed, quickly.

You can enhance your agility by practicing the movements in your training sessions and using an agility ladder is a helpful tool in any agility improvement program.

The most common agility ladder length is approximately 10 yards long with 18-inch squares. However, if you are on a budget, you can make your own ladder using tape, yarn or sticks. 

When you begin to incorporate the agility ladder into your training program, introduce your body to 2 to 4 different movements. 

Athletes require balance in all sports; soccer is no different.

Soccer players need balance when taking the ball on a volley from the goalkeeper, other players on the pitch and most importantly, when tackling and navigating between opposing players.

Each of these eventualities needs the exercise of just the correct amount of flexibility at the right time. With balance training, the idea is to recreate and manipulate what you would do in a game situation. Maintaining balance means having the centre of your mass in the middle of your base for support. 

Once upon a time, people thought that perfect balance was best illustrated by standing on one leg and staying as still as possible for as long as possible. While this is a measure of some sort, other strategies are more helpful for sports.

For example, single-leg exercises on a BOSU ball and slide-board lunges are both excellent for improving your balance. 

Some other points to recollect:

soccer adviser logoMaximal strength training should be a progression from general strength training with maximal loads. 
soccer adviser logoHeavy maximal exercise is only used for more complex strength training.
soccer adviser logoGood core and back strength is vital if heavy lifting exercises are going to be used. 
soccer adviser logoPlyometric exercises consist of hopping, bounding, and jumping movements. These exercises demand a high force of contraction, responding to a quick loading of extending the muscles.

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