Abstract
Football (soccer) performance requires a diversity of physical attributes and biomotor abilities, such as strength, power, jump mechanics, repeat sprint ability, change of direction and on-ball skills. In-season training focus is often based on metabolic conditioning activities such as small sided games, tactical and technical football drills and traditional running drills in order to further develop and maintain aerobic and anaerobic capacity. However, this often comes at the expense of strength training, which may be compromised for additional time on the pitch. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to provide an evidenced-based approach, to the periodisation of strength and power during a football season. Secondly, the increased popularity of incorporating on-pitch pre-rehabilitation and injury prevention programs that utilise unstable exercises during the entire season to maintain strength and power will also be discussed. Collectively, literature suggests that strength and power maintenance can be achieved with one strength session per week for football athletes. However, it is important for strength and conditioning coaches to continue the development of strength and power characteristics during a football season, which not only assists on-pitch performance but may also attribute to reduction of injury risk. Evidence supporting the effectiveness of on-pitch pre-rehabilitation programming centred on unstable training is lacking at this time.
Highlights
Football is a sport that places a variety of physical and psychological demands on players, and as such requires physical attributes, including jumping, running, sprinting, and change of direction [7, 11, 14, 16, 19, 27]
Athletes average 25 explosive jumps [5, 14] during a match, and between 90 and 140 interactions withthe ball. These can include passing or shooting the ball and while the literature is limited to the amount of tackling performed during a game, the development of strength and power is crucial for football players, as strength contributes to the major biomotor abilities that football requires [5, 14, 27]
The results demonstrated that well trained athletes significantly improved their one repetition maximum (1RM) by 33.2%, rate of force development (RFD) by 26.0%, running economy (RE) by 5.0%, and time to exhaustion 21.3%, following eight weeks of strength training
Summary
Football is a sport that places a variety of physical and psychological demands on players, and as such requires physical attributes, including jumping, running, sprinting, and change of direction [7, 11, 14, 16, 19, 27]. Development of strength (r=0.852) and power (r=0.814) are significantly correlated to the quickness of an athlete [26], with faster athletes possessing superior performance markers [2,3,4, 9, 13, 17, 22, 28,29,30,31,32,33, 35], including counter movement jump (CMJ), squat jump (SJ), maximum speed, maximum velocity, change of direction (COD) and relative and absolute strength (squats) than slower athletes [2, 3, 9, 13, 17, 22, 29]. Stronger athletes are reported to be more resilient to fatigue, possess greater capacity to preserve power output at a given intensity [7,15], and greater RSA tasks [5]
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