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Warm Ups for Soccer Warming up, although important seems to be one of the most overlooked and underappreciated parts of soccer practices and games. If you are spending 15-20 minutes on a warm up and practicing or playing 3-4 times per week, that amounts to 1 hour per week of training time. This is a significant amount of time! You can choose to maximize this time and better prepare your athletes, or you can choose to waste an hour of training time per week (4 hours per month and 12-16 hours per season!). This article will build an understanding of what a warm up can do. Why warm up? When asked this question, the most common response by the coaches I work with has been, “To get the players ready to play, and hopefully avoid those nagging injuries (hamstring, groin, and hip flexor pulls).” If we choose to run with this opinion, the following breakdown should help organize our thoughts. Reasons behind the Warm Up:
Our warm ups are broken down into 2 phases:
In the Activation / Dynamic Stabilization period we will go through various movements and hold a stretch for 3 seconds. Some examples of these movements are lunge twist, hamstring and hip flexor quick stretches, lateral lunging, and lunge and reach (elbow to the instep). We then progress to some trunk twists, leg swings, and 3 variations of carioca (quick feet, driving step, and high knee). At this point you should have “Activated” most of the muscle groups that tend to give you problems, and you have started to raise the core temperature and heart rate. I usually give the players a minute or two at this point to catch their breath and stretch out anything that still might be tight (hamstring, groin, quad, hip flexors, calf, etc). This is the part where we transition form the Dynamic Stabilization period to the Movement period, where we work on some balance, lunges, squats, split squats, lateral single leg hops, etc. This takes the muscle you just “Activated” and starts to increase the dynamics of the movement. Although you want to keep the movements quick and reactive (plyometric) you are still “Focused” on stabilization and positioning. This gives you time to reinforce the proper muscle firing patterns and positions. Now the heart rate and temperature are up to a desired level, blood flow to the muscles and joints is ideal, and you have started to prep the Central Nervous System (get the mind and muscles on the same page). We are ready to get into the movement part of the warm up. I usually focus my movement section on cutting drills (deceleration, transition and acceleration out of a cut). We will set up cones (or players) standing 3-5 yards apart and have the players cut off each cone in a drill we call “Continuous Shuttles” (shown below in Diagram 1).
Diagram 1 As them master this drill and the cutting starts to look cleaner with no wasted steps, we progress to the Diamond Drills. These can be manipulated to fit your needs, you start by putting the players in a square (5-10 yards apart) and doing simple change of direction drills around the square (for instance: sprint, shuffle, back peddle, and shuffle). Then start having the players sprint across the square diagonally, plant and shuffle, reverse pivot and sprint, then sprint out. This will add a degree of difficulty like shown in diagram 2.
Diagram 2 At this point you can have some fun and start to modify the drill so that players are making different types of cuts, pivots, sprints, backpedals, turns, etc. You can also involve a ball and have the players passing, heading and volleying to one another as they come out of cuts. We will go into much greater detail with this drill in the articles on agility and reaction. By the end of the season you should have the players reacting to another player’s cuts and involving a ball. This concludes the warm up. Now would be a good time to bring the players in to a normal pre-practice drill like 5v2 or passing/defending drills. |
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