Preseason is a critical time in the soccer calendar. It’s a period where the foundations for the entire season are laid. However, it’s not without its challenges. For coaches and trainers, working with a squad of 25 individuals, each with unique needs and levels, can be exhausting. This is especially true when focusing on strength training, and utilizing tools Training Builder can be really helpful.
The Importance of Strength in Soccer
Strength is a fundamental aspect of a soccer player’s physical conditioning. It underpins many key attributes such as speed, power, endurance, and injury prevention. A solid base of strength allows players to:
- Enhance Performance: Stronger muscles contribute to more powerful shots, faster sprints, and better overall athleticism.
- Improve Durability: Strength training helps build robust muscles, tendons, and ligaments, which are crucial for withstanding the physical demands of soccer.
- Prevent Injuries: A well-structured strength training program can significantly reduce the risk of common soccer injuries such as hamstring strains, ACL tears, and ankle sprains.
- Increase Recovery: Stronger athletes tend to recover faster from intense workouts and matches, allowing them to maintain a higher level of performance throughout the season and train harder during the preseason.
Despite these benefits, implementing an effective strength training program during preseason can be fraught with challenges, especially when managing a large squad.
Struggles and Problems in Preseason Strength Training
1. Individual Fitness Levels
- Variation in Fitness: One of the biggest challenges is the variation in fitness levels among players. Some players may return from the off-season in peak condition, while others might need significant conditioning to get match-fit.
- Customized Programs: Creating individualized strength training programs for 25 players is time-consuming and logistically challenging. Each player may require a different approach based on their current fitness, injury history, and positional requirements.
2. Motivation and Engagement
- Maintaining Motivation: Keeping all 25 players motivated and engaged throughout the preseason can be tough. Strength training can be repetitive and exhausting, leading to mental and physical fatigue. Additionally, creativity and organization of strength training can be demanding for physical coaches as well.
- Variety in Training: Incorporating variety and competition into strength sessions can help maintain enthusiasm. However, designing such varied programs requires creativity and additional effort from the coaching staff.
3. Balancing Training Load
- Avoiding Overtraining: It’s crucial to balance strength training with other aspects of preseason conditioning, such as aerobic fitness, technical drills, and tactical sessions. Overtraining can lead to fatigue, decreased performance, and an increased risk of injury.
- Scheduling Conflicts: Coordinating strength training sessions with the overall training schedule can be complex, especially when accommodating the needs of 25 individuals, as mentioned before.
4. Resource Limitations
- Equipment and Space: Strength training requires appropriate equipment and space. With a large squad, ensuring that there are enough resources (like weights, resistance bands, and space) for effective training can be a logistical challenge.
- Staffing: Adequate supervision is essential to ensure that exercises are performed correctly and safely. This often requires additional coaching staff, which may not always be available.
These are typical struggles of physical coaches when programming strength training, and I had the same problems during my career. I can tell a story about each of the segments mentioned above. These were definitely the reasons why I constantly sought solutions to speed up the process of preparing strength training programs. When I mention strength, I don’t just mean heavy squats, bench presses, or deadlifts, but all activities that involve some type of training with external loads. In my work, I like to use such forms of training, and they are included almost every day in some form.
Daily Use of External Loads
I advocate that training with external loads can be used every day, with the modality depending on:
- Weekly goal
- Team’s condition
- Technical-tactical goal of the day
- Physical goal of the day
- Contents to be used in training
- Emotional state of the team
- Available time
Once we define the weekly goal and all the other factors mentioned, I choose the content and assign them the parameters we will use, such as:
- Content
- Complexity of content
- Sequence of content in training
- Duration of content
- Number of repetitions and sets
- Rest between sets and content
- Method
- Effort, exertion, and intensity
- Type and duration of contraction
- Equipment
Challenges in Training with External Loads
When we consider all these factors, training with external loads is more than circuit or station training with 20 activities lasting 30 seconds each, performed in two rounds once a week. I’m not saying this type of training doesn’t have its purpose in working with soccer players, but I believe it’s not enough and that we miss many opportunities to help them progress and improve.
This progress control was one of the main problems for me. Sometimes, I would set given loads with specific repetition and set schemes, and the load to be used. For example, everyone would do 4 sets of 6 repetitions at 70% of the average team load in the trap bar deadlift. The problem was that I didn’t take relative values or the players’ experience into the equation.
Another issue was that not all players respond the same to this modality; for some, it was just activation, for others, it was a sufficient stimulus, and for some, it was too much. Progressions through the week were also complex because not everyone progresses at the same rate. All this, of course, needed to be stored somewhere and communicated with the players. At one club, I had a problem because of the amount of paper I used (yes, seriously).
Training Builder
Key 1: Customized Training Plans
Training Builder is a system within the Ultrax app where coaches can create their training protocols and individual contents. Besides strength training, you can create:
- Energy training
- Plyometric training
- Power training
- Mobility training
- Core training
- Protocols
- Soccer content
Each of these modalities has its own parameters that can be defined. For example, in strength training, you can define the plane, the load you want to use, whether you will use the reps in reserve method or force-velocity methodology. In creating soccer content, you can choose the field dimensions, number of players, requirements, etc.
Defining Training Parameters in Training Builder
Key 2: Injury Prevention and Rehab Protocols
We will focus more on strength protocols or training with external loads. In training with external loads, we can define all the parameters mentioned above and create training segments in Training Builder. Each training protocol can be named, given a description, and divided into parts such as:
- Soft tissue preparation
- Mobility and stretching
- Plyometrics and power
- Strength
When I create team training, soft tissue work and mobility are always included, followed by a segment focused on explosiveness, then the strength segment.
Once I define a training protocol, I can place it in the calendar for all coaching staff and players to see what protocol awaits them for that day. Each player can see a picture or video of how the content is performed on their mobile or tablet in the gym, and the system guides them through the order of exercises and loads they can use. What’s very important is that the loads in the same protocol can be individualized for each player and saved to their profile to track progress or just the work done in that movement.
Training Builder in Practice: Smart Gym Environment
Besides team training protocols, I like to create individual protocols for each player. Based on preseason assessments, I usually create individual interventions for players depending on their strengths and weaknesses that we have established. Some players need to work on their weak links, such as hamstrings or quads if they have previous injuries. In addition to that, they will have protocols for hip mobility, core development, power, and strength. When I create all the protocols for the athletes, I simply copy them into different days of the week.
Player A can have his mobility protocol before a session on Monday, his upper body hypertrophy protocol on Tuesday after the session, and before the session, we will microdose some unilateral strength work. The goalkeeper might have a shoulder prevention protocol built and scheduled for Wednesday before the session because, on that day, we will have a lot of finishing and small-sided games, and he needs to be well-prepared for that. There are multiple options for the coaches here; you just need to know what you want to do. With Training Builder, we can create “smart” gym environments and track progressions easily.
Conclusion
Sometimes having great organizational skills is almost as important as the knowledge you possess. And I think that the coaches in Croatia are great at that. We can work in any conditions, and I know that we will do great work. But we also need to help ourselves and track this progression with the technologies surrounding us in the world of soccer.
A tool like Training Builder can be your time saver and organizational tool that can help you in your daily work. Besides these training protocols, we will also go a step further and build an Ultrax chatbot or an assistant coach within Training Builder and define training protocols in the system that you can immediately use for your teams. Imagine having an assistant with whom you can chat and build training programs together.
