One common thread that provides an advantage for all soccer players at any position is to be faster than the opponent. Incorporate these drills into your next speed session.
Considering that the term "power" typically evokes the perception of high-speed movement, many people are inclined to take the tenets of specificity to literally mean “train fast, be fast.” However, to create the most strategic methods of training and adaptation, it is vital to compartmentalize power into the primary testable and trainable elements.
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Oxygen uptake (or consumption) is a measure of a person’s ability to take in oxygen and deliver it to the working tissues, and the ability of working tissues to use oxygen. During low-intensity exercise with a constant power output, oxygen uptake increases for the first few minutes until a steady state of uptake is reached.
Knowledge of metabolic rate can help athletes as well as health-conscious people improve their exercise performance or obtain the fat-to-lean-mass ratio optimal for their personal situations. Two examples of how this works follow.
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Athletes in field and court sports require reactive agility—they must accelerate, decelerate, and change direction in a constantly changing environment. These requirements result in technical differences between sprinting in a field or court sport and sprinting the 100-m.
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Research shows that the appropriate integration of resistance training into the endurance athlete’s training can result in significantly better performance when compared to classic endurance training plans that focus only on aerobic endurance.
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Coaches can also benefit from understanding the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment as they relate to motivation. Although coaches use a mixture of both reward and punishment, using rewards and a positive approach is arguably the best approach because it focuses on what athletes should do and what they did right.
The periodization of training is facilitated by a hierarchical structure that allows for several distinct interrelated levels that can be used in the planning process. Each level of the periodization process should be based on the training goals established for the athlete or team.
Scenarios that provide a stimulus relevant to the sporting environment may help athletes develop better anticipation skills through the refinement of search strategies, response speed and accuracy, pattern recognition, and decision-making abilities.