Science enters the world of soccer
Football is a fast-paced game: players typically cover 8 to 12 km during a 90-minute match, with their heart rate maintained at 80-90% of their maximum.
Stéphane Perrey, University of Montpellier
Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash, CC BY-SA
In addition to the specific endurance required to cope with the physiological demands of the game, soccer players face another challenge: sprinting more often and faster under space and time constraints in order to perform well!
In this context, the Association of Professional Football Fitness Trainers, represented by its President Sébastien Lopez-Guia, a professional FFF fitness trainer recognized for bringing together the majority of football specialists in the French professional and amateur circuit, has partnered with the University of Montpellier (Laurent Mortel and Stéphane Perrey) to create a unique training program: the University Diploma in Football Performance Optimization. Through this partnership, different approaches to athletic training for soccer players are being developed in professional clubs. This training program responds to a growing demand for highly specialized degrees that provide targeted scientific skills combined with practical skills as they are currently applied in all high-level clubs. With the help of human movement sciences, it is now possible to identify motor signatures in soccer.
Force in motion: a "useful" force in soccer
The ability to generate both rapid force and high muscle power is considered to be among the most important physical performance characteristics, particularly in activities that involve repeated jumping, changes of direction, and/or speed.
This is the case in soccer, which involves numerous sequences of movements that require the ability to perform "explosive" actions such as acceleration or deceleration, sprints, and jumps, depending on the position played on the field.
Statistics show that players cover an average sprint distance (≥ 24 km/h) of 250 meters per game, with players reaching maximum speeds of around 32 km/h. Soccer players are also required to perform approximately 60 sprint sequences per game while making several changes of direction and jumping actions. The common feature of these forms of movement is that they generate large amounts of force in relatively short periods of time.
How can you get stronger to move better?
Strength training is often equated with or even reduced to increasing muscle mass. While this is partly true, the fact remains that strength training has other aspects, such as explosive strength, endurance strength, speed strength, etc., each corresponding to different muscular qualities that can be specifically trained in soccer.
Stephane Perrey, Author provided
One area of modern physical training that is experiencing a revival is functional training. This type of training aims to integrate the needs and constraints of the sporting situation into the training environment in order to improve training effectiveness. In other words, functional training to develop "explosive" strength and power should be seen as training in which the exercises and movements proposed are integrated, multidirectional, and enriched in a beneficial way.
In practice, functional training involves a range of movements based on kinetic chain exercises (involving a group of muscles), ballistic movements such as throwing weighted balls, and dynamic balance activities that require proprioception and core strength.
It is important to remember that the principle is to work the muscle chains as a whole by targeting the major physiological and neuromuscular systems. Unlike more traditional, analytical strength training, which focuses on one or more muscles by isolating them, functional training takes into account the entire muscle chain and joints. The upper and lower limbs work together rather than in isolation.
Forget repetitive barbell lifts in favor of comprehensive exercises involving simple to complex explosive movements based on each individual's creativity. Functional training can take the form of workshops (such as circuit training), bodyweight exercises (exercises without equipment), or exercises using various accessories (elastic bands, unstable supports, weights, straps, etc.) and specialized machines.
Movements that do not lack control
The goal of functional training is to closely replicate game situations in training. However, cognitive demands are often overlooked in the context of muscle strengthening alone. Successful performance requires physiological and cognitive abilities that are interdependent or interrelated. Achieving neuromuscular adaptations specific to the movements of soccer players requires control of two types of effort: physical effort and mental effort. Once again, functional training can address this issue.
An important element in the principle of training specificity is the intention behind the muscle action and the nature of the effort. A key training stimulus is the nature of the motor command and the resulting motor unit activation patterns associated with high-speed movements.
These central motor commands activate the muscles in a manner consistent with the intention and, in addition, promote specific physiological adaptations. The nature of the mental effort directly influences the quality and quantity of the movement and, consequently, all physiological adaptations and ultimately the final performance.
This could lead to more effective muscle coordination and contraction patterns because we are not just training the muscles, we are training the movement! For example, springing during a jump should be the intention, and jumping becomes a means to achieve that goal but is not the desired goal itself. Applied to the context of training, we learn to better perceive the effectiveness of a movement when we discover solutions ourselves through free exploration of the repertoire of movements available to us: this is the added value offered by functional training, whether assisted by external resistance or not.
The functional training method described is designed to improve the specificity of physiological adaptations underlying the types of movements to be performed, not to improve perceptual and cognitive abilities. Functional training is not exclusive. Other methods of strength development are necessary to achieve other goals in terms of muscular adaptations, such as increasing muscle size, which are building blocks of functional performance. The various markers of a soccer player's movement (cognitive, physiological, neuromuscular, sensorimotor) thus constitute a behavioral map that contributes to the accuracy of diagnostic predictors of performance. From there to saying that game intelligence can be seen in the imprints of players' movements, there may be more than one step to take.
Stéphane Perrey, University Professor, Deputy Director of the EuroMov Laboratory, University of Montpellier
The original version of this article was published on The Conversation.