Training without the ball is not beneficial

Players running in small groups during a training session.
Photo courtesy of extremesoccerloverx.blogspot.com

By Samuel Morewabone

“Playing the ball exclusively is the best way for soccer players to build fitness.” That was said by Sports photographer and editorialist, Axel Heiken. As true as the afore mentioned expression is, some of our local tacticians consider spending too much time running without the ball, all in the name of “fitness.”

Players, particularly amateurs should practice purely with the ball. Studies and surveys points out that footballers run 4-7miles (contingent on position) during the 90 minutes of a football match. They are subjected to abbreviated but critical and intense periods of hard work at atypical intervals complete rest periods.

Players go through toilsome training sessions week in and week out. In most cases, physical trainers are amply won over by the cliché that if they are physically prime than their next opponents, then they will get the better of them with ease and minimal repose. Physical fitness has more than its due credit that some coaches have the assumption that other prospects like mental fitness and tactics of the game of football are utterly standard and thus physical fitness is crème de la crème.

This has gone to a degree where by all on-field troubles are blamed on lack of “fitness”. In addition a lot of this collateral running would probably be of paramount use if they were orthogonal to the game of football itself.

It is boring that our local players in the premier league spend most of their time at their teams, doing something similar to fartlek training and can’t even string 4-5 passes in between themselves, to say the least!

However, endurance is still a vitally important virtue in a football player. In training sessions, it will actually make a wholly sense and logic for Michael Kopt’s notorious “Intermittent endurance training” to reproduce the types of exertion found in literal and actual match play. It can also be seen as a varieties of definitive interval training methods where players do acute and intensive sprints until the game ends, giving the players longer breaks.

In the long run, players must be vulnerable to short periods of exertion that may be maximal or submaximal. However, these should always be soccer-specific, interrupted by brief, irregular rest periods because the higher the ability level, the shorter the breaks.

Intermittent endurance training is somehow similar to fartlek training in the demands it places on the heart and circulatory system. It also allows training of technical/tactical concepts simultaneously. KP