Strength Training to Improve Tackling
Read MoreTempo – What is it? Is it important?
Read MoreSlow Twitch and Fast Twitch
Read MoreOff Season Running – An Introductory Article
This will only be a fairly general first article on this topic, and we will expand upon this as well as give direction and advice with the running conditioning in the months ahead. But we will use this article to get a few key concepts out there straight off the bat.
The most common form of running that amateur and junior footy players out there do is the standard 5m or 10km runs to ‘get some km’s in the legs’ or ‘lay a foundation’ or to ‘be ready for the start of pre-season.’ So when someone says ‘I’m going for a run’, that is quite literally what they are doing. However this is a very inefficient use of time and effort, and your time and effort would be best spent changing this up slightly.
Read MoreThe most important point to Strength Training for Football
I will keep this to a very short and sharp point here, and give a few very important reasons for this point too.
The most important point is that no individual exercise in and of itself is all that brilliant or all that important to strength training for footy – what is far more important is how that exercise is incorporated into an overall program, and how that exercise is adapted and abbreviated to stimulate a response. In other words no individual exercise should ever be looked at as being super important – without consideration for the overall picture of what you are trying to achieve, and the other things that you must do to achieve that. Please read on to ensure that you grasp this all important key point and what we are trying to say, as well as why.
Read MoreThe Importance of Functional Strength – Not Maximal Strength
We have already covered in detail the pitfalls of a standard bodybuilding approach to strength training for football – and you should now be well versed in the fact that just because this form of training may make you look strong due to muscular development – it certainly doesn’t automatically mean that you are functionally strong. But we would like to build from this point a little, by discussing this concept of functionally strong – and what exactly this means when playing footy.
When you are embarking on a strength training program, it is important to always remember why you are doing it – always keep the end goal in sight. It is to improve your physical capacity specifically for game day – be it speed, tackling, jumping ability, stronger body at contests,etc. But just as it is important to remember you aren’t just aiming to put on useless muscle without function (bodybuilding), you must also remember that strength itself is also not the end goal.
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