Muscular Endurance is needed in football to keep the muscles contracting for the full length of the match without them becoming tired or weak. Muscular Strength is the force your muscles exert when they contract. This is an important part of football as it is a contact sport and it is also very physical, players need to be able to guard the ball and hold other players off when they are challenging for the ball. Also muscular strength is useful when taking a throw-in, good muscular strength in the abdominal muscles is required to throw the ball higher and further to reach a player that is a long distance away from the touch-line.
Speed is the ability to perform a movement in a short period of time. This is essential in football, for example to be able to sprint after a through ball or tackle an opponent who is through on goal. Agility is the ability to change direction quickly and control movements of the whole body. This is needed to be able to change direction quickly while dribbling or to collect a loose ball. Cardiovascular Endurance is the ability of the heart, lungs and circulation to deliver oxygen and remove waste during exercise. This is essential for the player to keep a constant pace all the way through the match. It would be better to improve this by running long distances or cycling.
Ball Skills: – the skills in football are all open skills. This means that the movement will change in a different environment. A skill is a particular action or set of actions. These are essential for football as they cover everything from a simple pass to more complicated skills of dribbling the ball in different directions. These are all motor skills as they are skills involving movement. Obviously not all of these can be covered in 6 weeks but by using all the different types of training including circuit training and weight training, a few of these could be improved. I will be training once a week to start off with. I will then increase this to twice in the third week and then 3 times by week 4. I will start off with 30 minutes training sessions. I will then increase this by 5 minutes every week. By week 6 I will have 45 minutes training sessions. A warm up and warm down must also be included.
Overload
To improve the fitness of a part of the body, you need to overload it. That means you need to make it work harder than usual. Over time, it adapts to meet the increased demand by getting fitter. You can overload your body in three ways: By increasing the frequency of the exercise. In other words how often you do the exercise. For example start by exercising twice a week, then move up to three or four times a week. By increasing the intensity of the exercise. In other how hard you work. For example run faster or lift heavier weights. By increasing the time you spend on the exercise. If you are very unfit you might start off jogging just for 5 minutes a session, and work your way up week by week to 30 minutes a session.
Progression Your body takes time to adapt to the increased demands on it. So you should build up your exercise level gradually. But once it reaches a certain level when it can comfortably deal with the level of exercise, it will not improve anymore. This is called plateauing. To prevent this from happening the exercises must be made progressively harder to ensure that the body continues to improve.
Reversibility Your fitness level changes all the time and it will go down if you stop training. It takes much longer to gain fitness than to lose fitness. Therefore it is essential that exercise be carried out regularly to keep your fitness level up to scratch. I have made sure of this in my training programme by doing it on a regular basis. Tedium Tedium should be avoided in all training programmes. By using a variety of training methods we will keep our enthusiasm and not become bored. Training programme Each week then will be different. The reasons for doing the similar exercises would be so that averages could be taken in the results and would be easy to conclude and analyse. This method would also reduce tedium during the training programme.
Warm up As I mentioned above, before every activity there should be a five-minute warm up. This is essential because the warm up would increase the blood flow to the muscles, stretch the muscles and concentrate the mind on the training. Our warm up should include: A period of moderate exercise using the entire body, for example, light jogging. A period of gentle stretching. We should work on the joints most likely to be emphasized during our central training session.
The main muscles that need to be stretched are: 1.Hamstrings 2.Quadriceps 3.Gastrocnemiuis 4.Triceps 5.Deltoids 6.Trapezium In your stretching include all four types of stretching: – static, passive, active and PNF stretching. Practising the various techniques and skills to be used in our training session. For example, a football player would perform some free kicks, throw-ins, etc. Warm down As I also mentioned above, before every activity there should be a five-minute warm down. This is essential because the warn down helps replace the oxygen debt in your muscles and also gets rid of the extra blood in your veins.