Athletitude

 

The most important facts in brief

• Speed can be trained and therefore improved
• Speed is one of the most important skills in football today
• The requirements and characteristics of a fast athlete are strength, technique, physique and genetics
• Influencing factors in training design are sprinting, strength and technique
• Speed is divided into 3 phases, which involve slight differences in training design: Acceleration, acceleration and top speed
• The most important principles in soccer speed training relate to break times, timing, frequency, volume and progression patterns

 

Speed training has become a hype in the football world. The big clubs and performance centers now employ sprint or speed experts in the athletics team. The athletics team is getting bigger and more specialized: from general athletics coaches to sprint, endurance, rehab and/or strength experts. Each member of the athletics team has their own focus area. The focus is placed on speed training and athletics in football from an early age. A huge amount of data is collected in this regard and analyzed down to the smallest detail.

Just hype or a logical consequence of the development of sport? We strongly argue for the second. Football has become increasingly physical and therefore more athletic, especially in recent years. Players like Ronaldo, Mbappé and Haaland dominate the game with their athleticism and are often responsible for decisive moments. It would therefore be almost negligent to deprive a player of this athletic training.

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This is not only important in terms of an athlete's performance, but is also indispensable in the area of injury prevention nowadays. It is therefore not surprising that amateur athletes often work on their athletic abilities in addition to their sport. If you want to get better, you work on your own athleticism.

In this article, we want to give you a rough overview of speed and speed training. We will discuss the importance, some theoretical concepts, the most important principles and tools. The aim is to further your knowledge in this area and provide you with assistance in designing your own training. This way you can work on your own speed to become a better athlete.

Why should I incorporate speed training for soccer?

Quite simply: to be faster in the game. Although many experts place the greatest importance on technical training - which we are not criticizing here - think about how many minutes of the game you actually have contact with the ball. Most of the time you move without the ball: you walk, run, sprint, tackle, slow down, change direction and so on.

Under this premise, the technical component moves more into the background at the expense of athletic components such as endurance, strength, power/explosiveness and speed. And how often are these athletic components decisive for the game?

• you pass the ball to your opponent and get past him/her (and go straight for goal),
• you catch up with your opponent before the shot on goal and prevent it
• you have more energy than your opponent in the last minute of the game and jump higher to score the winning goal with a header

It is therefore obvious that these skills should be promoted. What's more, everyone is talking about injury prevention these days in order to minimize the risk of injury to the athlete. Accordingly, we athletics trainers make our athletes more resistant to injury by introducing strength and sprint training on a regular, targeted and well-dosed basis.

What do I need to know about speed training in soccer?

First of all, you should understand what constitutes a sprint. The sprint does not look the same depending on the phase and also requires different athletic components or to a different extent. Basically, we divide the sprint roughly into 3 phases:

• Start: the first steps after the body is set in motion or accelerated from a standstill or constant speed (e.g. walking or jogging). This is therefore the initial phase of the sprint. In this phase, the strength and power components are decisive and dominant, especially the horizontal component. The 3 phases are also subdivided by numbering the steps and assigning them to a specific phase. Depending on who defines it and which sport we are talking about, the start would be described as the first 5 steps.
• Acceleration/transition: Phase between starting and reaching top speed. Steps 6-20 are part of the transition. Compared to the start, the steps become longer, the ground contact times shorter and the time in the air longer. According to the technical sprint model, the leg movement gradually changes from a more bolt-like to a cyclical movement. The upper body straightens up step by step until it reaches the vertical position. The horizontal focus gradually decreases in favor of the vertical.
• Top speed: the moment at which you have reached your top speed. The focus here is on reactivity, which means very short ground contact, whereby a huge amount of power is produced in this short time. With elite sprinters, we are talking about several times your body weight within milliseconds. Accordingly, most hamstring injuries occur in this phase.

Influencing factors

There are a number of factors that can influence sprinting speed. The most important of these include

1. Physique/genetics: The physique of the athlete can also have an influence on speed. Athletes with long legs compared to the torso and a lower body fat percentage often have an advantage as they have a greater relative stride length and less non-functional body weight and can therefore move faster. Genetics also play a crucial role in terms of muscle fiber types (hence "he/she was born to be a sprinter"), although we will not go into this in detail here as it is beyond the scope of this article.
2. Strength/power: Good strength development is crucial when sprinting. The ability to push off quickly (reactively) and powerfully is the key to achieving high speed.
3. Sprint technique: Good running technique is also important. Optimal body movement ensures efficient locomotion and enables the athlete to increase their speed.

Training principles: What do I need to consider when training speed in soccer?

When designing your soccer speed training, you need to know which elements have an impact on improvement and which specific training techniques will make you faster.

We like to visualize this using a machine, where certain levers are operated with a certain amount of force, resulting in sprint performance. For the sake of simplicity, let's imagine three levers, which must be precisely coordinated with each other. This requires a sure instinct and an understanding of the interdependence of these levers.

Training methods

The three levers mentioned above are:

• Sprinting: pure intensive sprinting
• Strength: maximum strength and power training (weightlifting, plyometrics, ballistics)
• Technique: training of kinematic characteristics (hip flexion, landing position of the feet, angle of the torso, etc.)

From our experience, we would argue that the order of importance and therefore transfer to sprint performance is as listed above, with sprinting bringing the greatest transfer. Put simply, to get better at an activity, you need to perform it. In other words, if you want to get better at playing football or cooking, you have to play football or cook. In terms of sprinting, this means that if you want to sprint faster, you have to sprint!

Then, because sprinting places high demands on strength and power, we would put strength training in second place. Also because strength training has a direct influence on sprinting technique (especially acceleration).

Direct technique training comes last.

Coaching

It is important to us to emphasize this, as we are increasingly seeing coaches "overcoaching", i.e. exerting too much influence, which tends to be counterproductive. Firstly, too much input from the coach can confuse and overwhelm the athlete; secondly, coaches too often try to impose the model sprint on the athlete, forgetting that individuality is important and should be maintained. A footballer sprints differently to an elite sprinter, and even elite sprinters have significantly different sprinting techniques. And there is often a good reason for these nuances - and if not, we agree that we should start with the technique, although we must also ask ourselves whether it is more efficient to use the force lever, for example, to bring about the desired improvements in technique.

 

This is because technique is influenced by strength and reactivity. An athlete who deviates from the sprint model may do so because he/she does not have the necessary strength and reactivity. The human body is a fascinating construct that, when faced with a task and circumstances, tries to find the most efficient way to solve it. The more often it is confronted with this task, the greater the learning effect and the more efficient the solution. Long story short. Before we rashly try to bring the athlete directly into line with the model sprint, analyze the sprint technique shown and ask yourself why the athlete sprints the way he/she does. Do the deviations from the sprint model make sense in his/her case or not? If yes, then you don't need to make any changes to the technique and if no, you need to think carefully about how you can make the corrections to the technique without making the technique worse.

Stimulus

What is superordinate to these 3 elements is the stimulus or dosage: how much and how often do I apply a certain stimulus (sprinting, lifting weights and technique training). We can visualize the stimulus (the dosage) in our model of the machine from above as "how hard do I press the lever".

External factors must also be taken into account as part of stress management: physical and mental stress from team training, matches, pressure to perform in sport and school, personal circumstances, sleep and nutrition. All of this determines how I have to pull the lever to achieve optimum results. Also be aware that the 3 levers also influence each other in the outcome. Strength training has an influence on sprint technique and sprint times, sprinting in itself generally improves technique and you develop more strength, technique training can lead to better sprint times.

Important principles

As you can see, the whole thing is quite complex and can be confusing, not to mention leave you with a lack of clarity when it comes to training design, which may drive you to despair. However, we can give you some important principles and rules of thumb that you can follow and use as a guide to incorporate speed training in football effectively and easily.

1. Break times: the be-all and end-all of sprint training, which we cannot emphasize enough, is to take enough breaks between each sprint. I keep repeating this to my team coaches in my job because it is so important. Stop the break times! If you don't keep to the minimum breaks, you are doing endurance training instead of speed training. You have to perform every single sprint in a completely rested state and therefore with 100% effort. In our experience, athletes also tend to have the feeling that they are already fully rested, even though they are not, due to the fact that the central nervous system is left out of the recovery process. Therefore, stick to the following simple rule: for every 10 meter sprint, a minimum break of 60 seconds applies. Once again, we draw your attention to the word "minimum". If you still feel like you need more rest after the minimum break, then go ahead. The idea is simply that you don't take such a long break that your body shuts down and gets cold. Elite sprinters often rest for more than 60 seconds after a 10-meter sprint.
2. Frequency: we recommend 1-2 sessions per week during the season and 2-3 during the season break, depending on training level, number of team training sessions and matches. One of these sessions should focus on longer distances and therefore top speed.
3. Timing: Up to 2-3 days before the football match, we do not recommend any hard speed training (except for children), with the top speed session being further away from the match day. If speed training is scheduled in football, then very low volume (e.g. only a maximum sprint). If you want to get the maximum out of it, we recommend carrying out the session in a fully rested state. This means before strength and team training and after full recovery (sleep and nutrition). The top speed unit is best done after a rest day, if possible. You should also take a break of around 72 hours (at least 48 hours) between two speed sessions.
4. Volume: This refers to the total meters sprinted per session. During the season, we recommend a maximum of 150 meters, while you can easily increase this to 250 or even up to 400 meters per session during the off-season. But start at the lower end. Sometimes more is simply more and not better. Be careful with the longer distances because there is a higher risk of injury, and don't do more than about 6 top speed sprints per week during the season (for footballers, this is roughly equivalent to a full sprint from 20-25 meters until top speed is reached). Anything more than this carries the risk of injury, as the sprints are very intense and therefore tiring and the body can no longer keep up with regeneration. Attention paradox: at the same time, it is important that you do the top sprints as injury prevention (reach your top speed at least once a week).
5. Progression pattern: It's important that you don't increase the volume too much from one session to the next. You want to make sure that your body is really ready for the extra volume and that you don't risk injury. That's why we recommend you don't do more than 10% more from session to session or week to week, so if you sprinted 100 meters in the first week and feel you can handle more, then add 10% and don't do more than 110 meters in the next session. If that goes well and you feel good, then you can increase the volume by another 10 meters the following week.

The decisive factor here is the stimulus/dosage, the timing and the manner. All of this has to do with the necessary regeneration to bring about adaptations in the body and thus the desired improvements. In addition to training, regeneration is the key to success. Training without sufficient regeneration is useless, because the desired results are only achieved during the recovery phase. No or too little training stimulus, i.e. still regeneration potential, means no or sluggish success; too much training stimulus, i.e. no complete regeneration, means no progress, regression or injury. As always, the golden mean is the holy grail and it is important to find it. With experience, this works better and better, and you develop a better and better body awareness. That's why it's so important to listen to your body. Your body determines the parameters of the 5 above.

Examples of training design

Here we provide you with 3 possible training plans as an example for the design of a sprint unit for each individual sprint phase. You can customize these according to your needs and the principles and rules of thumb presented above:

Start

• Plyometrics: broad jumps 2×2, one-legged broad jumps 2×2
• Sprints: 4x5m from a half-kneeling starting position. 8x10m (these can also be done with heavy resistance: Resistance pull, sled or steep incline)

Transition

• Plyometrics: consecutive broad jumps 2×2, single-leg hops 2×5-10
• Sprints: 6x15m. 3x20m (these can also be done with light to medium resistance: Resistance pull, sled or slight incline)

Top speed

• Plyometrics: low jumps one-legged 2×2
• Sprints: 2-6×25-30m (alternatively, you could also work with flying sprints here)

Strength training is of course part of sprint training. However, we will go into this in more detail in a separate article.

Final notes

You will have noticed that you can also combine the individual training sessions and integrate them into a single unit. You always start with the shorter distances and gradually build up the distances. This makes it easy to pack two or all phases into one session. The important thing is simply to know your own capacities and use these to determine the total volume (total distance) of the unit (see our recommendations above). If you are advanced, however, it is often better to focus on one quality (e.g. top speed), while the other qualities are set to "maintenance", i.e. only just enough volume to maintain these qualities.

The more qualities you want to improve, the higher the risk that you won't improve any quality at all. This is also a common mistake in the gym: you want to improve your chest, back, legs and glutes all at once, for example, but in the end you don't improve anything. This is also something that coaches don't want to understand: You can't, for example, improve endurance and speed in the same exercise, in the same training session, or even in the same training period. For example, it is not possible to train 10-metre sprints with less than the recommended minimum break of 60 seconds in order to kill two birds with one stone, i.e. to combine endurance and speed training.

We would like to note here that most soccer players benefit specifically from top speed speed training because they already have a lot of running and acceleration work in training and games (i.e. you tend to sprint shorter and medium distances) and because improving top speed has a positive effect on running and acceleration.

Conclusion

As you can see, you can easily put together your own soccer speed training by following the training principles outlined above. Speed is a highly sought-after quality of a footballer in football and we therefore recommend that you pay sufficient attention to it. Speed can be trained and therefore improved. However, it is always better to have a coach with experience for the right soccer speed training.

If you have any questions about speed in football or other athletics-related topics, don't hesitate to write to us at info@athletitude.ch. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive exciting and informative news and knowledge about sprinting and athletics. Just send us an e-mail with the subject "Newsletter". If you would like to consult us as experts and work with us to take you to the next level, don't hesitate to contact us.

 

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