Training for Football Fitness

Jogging up and down the pitch a few times is not enough. In the course of a match, a midfield player will run seven miles.
What footballers really need is...explosive power. This allows them to switch between rapid bursts of sprinting and leaping into headers. Footballers can get this explosive power by using a training method called 'plyometrics'.

Plyometric training
In the 1960s, athletes in the Soviet Union used plyometric exercises to improve their performance in jumping events. Gradually, the technique became accepted as a valuable tool for many sports that involve sprinting and jumping.

Muscles can undergo two different types of contractions: concentric contractions that shorten muscles, and eccentric contractions that lengthen muscles and hold them under tension.
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A little bit of thinking now...Do you want to improve your game?

Every athlete, no matter what the sport, needs to train themselves to increase power because power is the gauge by which both performance and potential is measured. All athletes will train exclusively to increase power - even those athletes in "endurance" sports. Let's consider two sports not normally considered "explosive": In distance running, you have stride-length and in swimming, there's diving from blocks, blasting off the wall on a turn... all of these things are explosive, powerful movements and can make the difference between winning and losing.

In fact, stride-length is quickly becoming a deciding factor in the potential of a long-distance runner because it is a major factor in energy expenditure - and it's the reason why more and more "endurance" athletes are starting to increase their vertical leaps.

The single best way to increase power (and athleticism in any sport) is by training to increase vertical leap and then also using these principles to train your upper body, too. The principles that underpin vertical leap training are crucial to any sport and the height of an athletes vertical leap is the sole expression of this.

No matter what your sport, you must get this crystal-clear: the higher the vertical jump, the better, because vertical leap training is performance-enhancement training and the future of it.