Your Body: Achieve Power and Speed with Plyometrics
March 22, 2007
According to Wikipedia, muscular power is determined by how long it takes for strength to be converted into speed. So, how efficiently are you converting strength into speed? Is your opponent beating you to the ball or just edging you out and breaking through? Do you ever wonder what makes players like Roberto Carlos so fast and powerful?
Well, some of it has to do with God given talent and genetics however; there are ways to achieve power and speed and plyometrics could be a potential solution for you. Plyometrics are a type of exercises that use explosive movements to develop muscular power, the ability to generate a large amount of force quickly.
Implementing a plyometrics workout could effectively help you improve things like your vertical jump to win headers; it may help you to increase your break away or burst speed away from a defender or if you are a defender you may see benefits by increasing your tracking and marking capability. The benefits are numerous and plyometric exercises can be done a multitude of ways.
The Sports Fitness Advisor has some pretty good stuff on plyometric training and customized workouts for soccer players and here is a link to a few exercises with animated examples. They even have more advance soccer-specific plyometric plans for a fee of course. I can certainly attest to plyometrics working very well as we did a lot of it in college and other coaches often commented about team power and speed.
So, if you want to dominate the opposition with blazing speed and incredible power - get stuck in with a plyometric plan.
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I believe that you must train under pressure. The more it’s ratcheted up, the better.
Using the penalty kick example, take ten at the end of practice when your body is tired. Have team members yelling and screaming at you, running behind the net, trying to distract you. If you miss any, extra laps.
This works. I’ve been training this way for 30+ years and haven’t missed in a game situation.