Soccer speed training

Olympian teaches secrets for superior soccer speed training. As an Olympic medalist and holder of the 100m record in a time of 10.98s, I know speed and how to teach it. Click here to train to run faster for all speed based sports.

In the image below is Emma Fricker, an elite U13 player from the Erin Mills Soccer Club. I am putting some pressure on her to maintain her new sprinting technique. Notice her relaxed smile.

I competed in my first international competition at 11 years old where I placed 2nd at the mini Olympics in West Germany. During that period I played football/soccer in England as a winger.

What do I know about speed? Everything that you need as a soccer player to improve your sprinting, your suicides, and especially your game.

Not only that, but speed is a mental game, whether on the track or on the soccer feild.

This is what Emma's mom, Karen, said about the soccer speed training session with me "I sincerely appreciate both your expertise in helping her with her sprinting technique and your efforts to reinforce her belief in herself as an athlete."

I offer you my olympic sports hypnosis cd, click here, to help you master a strong belief in yourself as an athlete, which is often an over looked part of the game.

You will never need to run at my top speed when I competed as a world ranked athlete.

However, you will need to know how to accelerate, maintain the speed you have generated in a relaxed manner, decelerate, shift from one gear to another smoothly, and play at your best even when fatigued.

Even though my specialty was the 100m, I competed at the 400m in a time of 51.69s and the 800m in a time of 2min 13 sec, both are endurance distances. I never trained at long distances, only fast speed distances. In order to run such fast times, I had to have good speed and speed endurance.

Sprinters run with full high arms and fast legs for the entire distance of a race anywhere from 50m indoors to 100m outdoors. Soccer players can be seen more often using fast legs and sometimes running like a sprinter for much shorter distances of maybe 20m as they sprint to get the ball.

In order to run even short distances efficiently and fast, you must when doing soccer speed training, practice past that distance at very high speeds. Doing this allows the body to recruit the red fibres (fast twitch or speed muscles) , and to have them available and responsive when you need them.

Training at slow speeds produces slow (white fibres) and less reactive athletes, and only the naturally talented of those will produce results. If you want to move fast, you have to practice fast.

Here are three areas that produce fast muscles for soccer speed training.

In sprinting the AP is 0-40m, while in soccer the AP is 0-30m. Sprinting in this phase is difficult and artificial to train, because it is unnatural to run this way.

You have to have someone that knows what they are doing to catch the minor mistakes, and to translate the correct position to the learning football or soccer player. The player learns how to drive out, how to land the first step, how to paw down, how to lean, and other skills all the while maintaining proper technique. If this phase is done poorly, the rest of the run will suffer.

Here the soccer player learns how to sprint relaxed, while maintaining their top speed when chasing the ball. I have watched untrained players run so fast up to the ball and run past it, because they have not trained to adjust their gears. These athletes have one speed. Fast.

In the TP you learn how to shift from sprinting to running, and running to sprinting, which is all done smoothly and seamlessly. Soccer speed training during this phase employs a number of different skills, which I learned over many years including flying 10s, 20s, 30s, all with the aim of controlling top speed.

Speed endurance takes care of what I call the fatigue phase. This is over distance training at high speeds for much longer than you run or play on the field. Typically, a player will run 20m and rarely 30m when chasing a ball. To make this skill easier, the player must practice at distances of 120m or longer.

Soccer speed training in this phase is much more mental. The player maybe asked to do 4 times 200m at fast speed, and do not be surprised to hear them begin to complain. It was definitely not one of my favourite practices. However, once I learned it would allow me to compete over the 100m faster, then I was all for it.

For the soccer player, it will allow them to play at high levels for longer even when fatigued. The muscles will be accustomed to over working, because they adapted when pressed during training. You never want to try to get the best out of your fatigued players during a game; practice is the only time for that.

This is a very brief overview of what you can expect when you work with me, if you are interested in superior soccer speed training contact me, and I can give you referrals from past clients and teams.