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Guide to overall fitness
| Posted: 03 Feb 2007, 21:29 | |
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After much procrastination I have finally decided to type up an extensive guide to fitness. Fitness has a major impact on an outcome of a game and it is often neglected. By not focusing enough on conditioning, by the end of the game you or your whole team will become sluggish and that may cost you the game. Although without conditioning your fitness will not improve nutrition and rest also play key factors in your road to becoming well conditioned.
Warm up: An important part before starting any type of training is to do a light warm up. A warm up should consist of a light jog for 5 to 10 minutes. By warming up you're allowing your muscles to become used to the demand that will soon face them without demanding too much out of them which may cause injury. Warming up with a light jog will also increase blood flow to the muscles and dilate blood vessels which relieves the heart of added stress and allows blood to travel faster which can increase the time before you become fatigued A light jog is not the only thing required for a good warm up but also stretching. By stretching you increase the range of motion (ROM) of muscles, reduce chance of injury, and improves circulation which helps you whether you're playing in the championship game or training for when you are put in the position. A list of various lower body stretches are here http://exercise.about.com/cs/flexibilit ... tretch.htm which includes pictures. Some upper body stretches can also be found http://exercise.about.com/cs/flexibilit ... tretch.htm here. A rough outline of a warm up can consist of this should be 5 to 10 minutes light jogging and then 5-10 minutes stretching. Although both a light jog and stretching should be in everyones warm up it should also be tailored to your own needs since no one is the same. Aerobic Exercise: In football the most common type of running is aerobic running. Aerobic running is running at a pace which will increase your heart rate but won't leave you gasping for breathe in a minute or two. Aerobic exercise should consist of at least 30 minutes of continuous exercise at a moderate intensity. When you first begin aerobic exercise you should get your heart rate to increase but you shouldn't feel like falling over and dieing at the end. As with anything it must be taken cautiously at first and eased into. If you have a friend that you can begin running with a good rule of thumb is to run at a pace that you can keep a conversation without speaking something like “this is *gasp for air* going to *gasp for air* kill me *gasp for air*” because it means you're going too hard. The pace you probably set you at a much slower pace than what you want to go but it will help prevent injury by doing too much too soon. As you progress with your aerobic running your VO2 max will be increasing also. Anaerobic Exercise: Anaerobic exercises are exercises that cannot be sustained for long periods of time. This type of exercises includes things like sprints which obviously no one can sprint their hardest for 10 minutes at a time. Although this is much less involved in football than aerobic running it is very important when it is involved. By anaerobically training you can increase your speed and sustain them longer than you were previously able to before reading this guide. In football pure speed isn't as important as it is to be able to accelerate fact. In football you will almost never do a 100m sprint but you will plenty of time need to be able to sprint 20m or so to retrieve the ball. Being able to get up to a fast speed in a low time is more important that it is to be able to get faster than that in a longer amount of time. So training your anaerobic system should spend more time on drills which cause you to stop completely or almost completely. Although never entirely eliminate choices from what you do because some drills work better for others. There are many drills which will train your body to be able to produce a much more explosive power in a shorter amount of time. Jdefoe has two good drills that will help your acceleration improve at this post http://expertfootball.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3543 . Incorporating ideas likes these into your training once or twice a week will make a huge difference in your ability to intercept a pass that your opposition thought you had no chance at retrieving. Plyometrics: Plyometric exercises train your muscles to be able to act more explosively. By training your muscles to act more explosively you can increase your speed dramatically. This type of training shouldn't make you become fatigued because by becoming fatigued you're eliminating the part where your muscles will have to act explosively. When doing plyometrics you should do it before actual conditioning but after warm ups. When you first begin you must master the form or else you may cause injury to yourself. A list of plyometric drills for the legs can be found at http://www.brianmac.demon.co.uk/legplymo.htm . If this is your first time doing plyometrics I recommend doing 1 exercise for 3 sets with 10 reps each. Muscular Strength: Muscular strength is beginning to play a bigger role in football now also. Being able to push your opponent off the ball is becoming more important as players become more skillful. Muscular strength and it's meaning is pretty straight forward as it is the power of the muscles to do work. This type of training is usually done with low reps and more weight. Before even considering such training you should have a few months of training with weights under your belt with following the standard 3 sets of 10 reps for exercises. Also before doing this type of training you must have perfect form for the major compound exercises or else you can seriously injury yourself. By making your muscles have to handle a lot of weight it makes them have to adapt and be able to move this new weight. A good program to develop strength is a 5x5 program. This type of training you do 5 sets of 5 reps with a weight that challenges you. With strength training you generally want to do compound exercises. Compound exercises are exercises that use a lot of muscles instead of only 1 like an isolation exercise. Compound exercises include exercises like bench press, dead lift, and squats. Mucular Endurance: Muscular endurance is what allows your muscles to handle operating throughout an entire game without giving out in the first 10 minutes. The ability to have your muscles handle the demand on them for 90 minutes must be trained. Think about it. Your legs almost never stop moving for an entire 90 minutes and if you don't train your legs to be able to handle that you may have to be subbed out. Obviously if you want to train your muscles to handle this type of demand you must do exercises with or without weights that you do a lot of reps with. If you're training your endurance with weight a general rule is around 15-20 reps is a good range for muscular endurance. The weight you use should be lower than what you would use for a 10 rep range but it should still challenge you. Any point in which you're not challenging yourself you're not getting the most out of your work. This doesn't mean that you have to be in pain because quite often there will be little to no pain but instead your muscles just cannot handle it due to fatigue. When planning to train endurance of your muscles it would probably be best to do it about 3 times a week. By doing it 3 times a week it will allow your muscles to recover. You should try to do weight lifting one day and take the next off. Your muscles need 48 hours to recover from the previous training session. When doing endurance training you should try to break it up into 2 body parts a day. This will allow you to accomplish doing all muscles in a week. You will be able to find exercises that target muscles with ease here: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/exercises.htm Basic Nutrition: Good nutrition is important in getting the most out of your training. Without proper nutrition your body won't be able to handle the demand of training or games as well as it would be able to. By feeding your body the right types of food it will be able to manage itself much better and can last longer before fatiguing. The easiest thing to manage in your diet are on the nutritional facts on each food. These things include cholesterol, carbohydrates, protein, and much more. Carbohydrates - Carbohydrates are a must in any diet for a footballer. Carbohydrates are turned into blood glucose which is used to fuel the bodies energy sources. Without carbohydrates the body will decrease in energy fast. Although protein and fats are also converted into glucose for the body to use carbohydrates are converted to energy much faster and easier. This doesn't mean that protein and fats aren't necessary because it is actually quite the opposite as they are also important for the body to function. On days that you train you should take in a lot more carbohydrates that usual because your body will need more energy. The night before a game it is also vital to take in more carbohydrates so your body will be ready the next day with extra energy. Cholesterol – Although most of what we see on television tells us how cholesterol in high amounts is bad it is important to have some. With everything it must be taken in moderation because cholesterol helps for the membranes of cells. Never consume massive amounts but you must consume some to be healthy. Protein – Protein is an essential for building muscle. Anyone that is training hard most days of a week or even anyone just training will need more protein than a person who doesn't. Fats – There are 4 major types of fats and they are saturated fats, trans fats, mono-unsaturated fats, and poly-unsaturated fats. Trans fats are bad fats and should be avoided as they are linked to heart diseases. The good news is that they mostly occur in foods that are typically stereotyped as bad so you shouldn't have much of these in your diet anyways. You should never eat these though as they provide no benefit to overall health Studies have shown that mono-unsaturated fats are better than poly-unsaturated fats because it doesn't lead to coronary atherosclerosis. Both of these fats though seem to help protect against cardiac arrhythmias. Hydration – Hydration is very important whether you're in a match or just training. As your body sweats it not only loses water but also a lot of salt. By replenishing only the water your body will be over hydrated due to an imbalance of the salts and water. The result of too much water leads to a fatal condition called hyponatremia. This means that during things that will cause you to sweat a lot you should have a drink that contains sodium also. A simple drink to make that contains sodium also is just mix in some orange juice with water. If you're dehydrated during a match or training it can also cause poor performance and if not treated soon enough can lead to death. The chances of allowing yourself to dehydrate enough to die are slim but it is mostly important to stay hydrated because it really ruins your ability to play. This means any chance you get you should try to hydrate yourself because the human sense of thirst is quite weak. This means that a human is actually thirsty before they feel it so it is important to drink water even if you don't feel thirsty but are physically active. Goal Setting: Without setting goals many things you will want to achieve will never be reached. This is because a human loves to get rewarded for doing good. If you don't believe me why do we get grades in school or even in a video game a person loves the part where their hard work pays off and they get a new items or save someone. This concept is very important in any training program. If you don't feel as though you are improving (which boosts your confidence) you will give up fast. The key to good goal setting lays in picking a goal that will be hard to achieve but will be possible if you try hard enough. You must also set long and short term goals. This allows you to meet challenges along the way as you progress to your long term goal. By setting one long term goal you may never be rewarded for years. A good length for a goal is generally a month depending on the goal. This allows you enough time to achieve the goal but doesn't make you wait a year to get it. This goal also cannot be something like 'improve in this' by simply saying you want to improve you cannot measure it beyond what you remember from before. By trying to base results on memory will cause you to get distorted results and you may never actually improve. These goals you set should be more clear as to what you want to do. Instead of saying “I want to run longer” you should say “I want to run 5 miles in 40 minutes in a month”. This indicates that you were not able to previously run 5 miles in 40 minutes and if you beat this time you have improved. On the other hand with “I want to run longer” you don't have much to base in on on whether you have improved. In Conclusion: Training for football is not an easy task and there is much to it. This guide at the moment gives you a rough outline of how things work and how to improve it. Criticism is encouraged as the only way to make something better is to tailor it to everyones needs and wants. Any information that is given that is added will be put in without credit next to the new information but instead I will post people who have contributed in the section below this. This will help keep the guide a little bit nicer looking. I know that everyone loves to see sample programs and stuff so once I get a bit of free time again I will add in some sample programs to help people. Credits: Here is a list of people that have personally contributed in making this guide better: No one yet |
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| Posted: 03 Feb 2007, 22:05 | |
Poland Spring Rzadzinski Joined: 17 Jan 2007, 04:23 Posts: 6304 Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada |
Great post, sure to help a lot of people including myself. Thanks! 
"I wear tinted visor not to trick other players, but so hot girls in stands don't see me looking at them." -Alexander Ovechkin |
| Posted: 03 Feb 2007, 23:10 | |
Guide Goddess Joined: 30 Jun 2006, 22:00 Posts: 2076 Location: USA |
It's a good post, however, I didn't like how you kpet saying "more to be added later". I mean it just never got too far into the information. But, I'm a nice person, so I won't rate it until you finish up. I do like how you talk about everything, though. So, nice work! I can't wait to see what oyu have added.
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| Posted: 04 Feb 2007, 00:48 | |
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There I have fixed up all there things saying how I have more to add. I have enough stuff so that it will inform the generally public on things they might not have known before.
I realized it is still not too much in detail yet and I will fix that eventually but I don't feel like having one part of it very in depth and then the next just scratch the surface. Also I've taken out the agility section for a few weeks until I actually start to try different agility drills. Not much reason to post about things that I don't try so I can't give an opinion on how I think they help. Everyone be prepared in a couple of days because I plan to add more detail to the guides if I have time apart from school and practicing on my own. "Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness" |
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| Posted: 04 Feb 2007, 01:52 | |
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Guide Goddess Joined: 30 Jun 2006, 22:00 Posts: 2076 Location: USA |
Okay, I made it a sticky, and I gave it 5 stars. Nice work!
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