Soccer Conditioning: Improving Speed

Increasing your speed will seriously benefit you on the Soccer pitch. Being fast gives you an advantage in getting past players in one on one situations, catching up to opponents on the defensive end, and getting into open areas to receive a pass.

If you work on improving your speed, in return you will improve your overall on field performance. This article will discuss several ideas for improving your speed.

All soccer players should work to improve their speed through soccer conditioning exercises, regardless of how fast or quick they may already be.

There are two types of speed: frontal and lateral.  

Frontal speed relates to your speed of forward movement and lateral speed is your side to side movement. Neither type of speed should be neglected when it comes to training and players should focus on developing both.

Below are some sprint training exercises for increasing frontal and lateral speed. Remember, these soccer training exercises should be performed only after a quality soccer warm up. All sprints should be performed with sufficient rest between exercises. The focus of this training is improving speed as opposed to soccer endurance training.

Drill #1 – Irregular Starts

These sprints should be performed over 30 yards. Place an emphasis on producing an explosive acceleration of speed. Perform sprints from a variation of starting positions. Examples include push up position, sitting on your hands, lying on your back, or doing 5 squat jumps or push ups before accelerating into a full out sprint.

Drill #2 – Accelerating Sprints

This drill should be performed over a distance of about 100 yards. From a normal starting position gradually accelerate to reach full speed, hold full speed until you reach the 100 yard mark. This drill helps to develop accelerating speed as well as top speed endurance.

Drill #3 – In & Outs

This drill focuses on developing lateral speed. You will need 7 Cones (if you don’t have cones you can use rocks, balls, whatever you can get your hands on). Set up the cones similar to the diagram. Starting from the first cone, sprint to each cone, touch the cone and accelerate off to the next. Try to take quick steps and convert lateral speed into frontal.

Drill #4 – The Four Corners

This drill focuses on developing both frontal and lateral speed. Set up a series of cones similar to the diagram. The player will begin in the middle of the four cones.

• Sprint forward to the 1^st cone, sprint backwards to the middle cone, side shuffle to the 2^nd cone, side shuffle back to the middle cone, backwards sprint to the 3^rd cone, forward sprint to the middle cone, then finally side shuffle to the 4^th cone and back to the middle.

Initially you may want to try doing each exercise 3 times. As you become more physically fit you can increase the amount of repetitions for each exercise. Remember to always keep pushing yourself (get out of your comfort zone!); if 3 times becomes too easy, move to four, then to five, etc.

These are all soccer conditioning exercises you can do on your own, and should do on your own if you want to increase your speed and become a better Soccer player.

For more on improving your overall soccer fitness you may want to take a look at this Guide to Total Soccer Fitness.

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