Sport Science for Soccer: Working Smarter

Enjoy this second part of our Sport Science for Soccer series from our Performance Unlimited partner John Lytton.  Read more of his blogs.

Success is made through smart work not more work. Last week I introduced the four principles of sport science for soccer you need to understand to train smarter. 

There are many physiological principles (truths) that exist within our body and its systems. But as an amateur sports scientist, the four I will outline in this series are the most important to physical development. If you want to ensure your long-term success and enjoyment of the game, get to know these principles and put them into your practice. 

#1 Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands.

Otherwise known as the SAIDs principle. When you want to expand any physical ability beyond its current capacity, you must train that ability, specifically. This means training the specific muscles, in the specific direction, using even the specific energy system that will be focused in the demands of competition. 

The caveat is that you have to train that quality with minimal interference so that the body is given the chance to allocate energy during recovery to adapt to that quality. Simply put, if you want to get faster. Train speed. Not a combination of speed, strength, conditioning, technical, futsal, golf, basketball, dance …all at once. 

YOU DO NOT ACHIEVE QUALITY FITNESS, SPEED, AND STRENGTH BY PLAYING YOUR SPORT. This is a misunderstanding of physiological principles. Competitive matches dictate the speed, the amount of running, the frequency of changes in direction, and so forth. The game’s variability makes you much more likely to never truly work hard enough to increase specific portions of fitness. For instance, you never run fast enough to develop a higher level of speed. Certainly, you don’t have opportunities to change movement flaws into leveraged skill in the midst of a competitive game. 

Fortunately, our body’s are smart and we don’t have to choose one physical quality to train at a time. But, the SAID principle does mean that if you isolate one quality you will effectively and efficiently get better at that one quality. However, where you gain in one area, you lose in another (take a look at the physical differences of the sprinter and marathon runners in the image!). 

So, on one hand you can’t isolate because you will lose and on the other hand you can’t combine too many qualities into a training phase because you will interfere. Your body tends to get confused when you throw too much “stuff” at once and ends up spreading its energy to adapt to all of it, which usually leads to effectively adapting to none of it. 

So how do we know how much is enough but not too much? Glad you asked…

#2: General Adaptation Syndrome. 

Back in the 1930s, a German scientist by the name of Hans Selye discovered that our body goes through stages of the healing process before it is able to develop an adapted response to a given stress. The Russians picked up on Selye’s work and adapted it to athletic development. Their work gave us a roadmap to help create more robustness using training stress. 

Selye originally created the stages of stress by observing various people in many different stressful situations. The outcome was always the same: Alarm, Resistance, Exhaustion. 

In terms of sports performance, when a training stress is introduced, the initial phase reduces performance capacity as a result of accumulated fatigue, soreness, stiffness, and a reduction in energy stores. This alarm phase initiates the adaptive responses central to the resistance phase of this syndrome. 

If the training stressors are not excessive and planned appropriately, the adaptive responses will occur during the resistance phase. Performance will either return to baseline or elevate to new higher levels (super-compensation). However, if training stress is excessive, performance will be further reduced in response to the athlete’s inability to adapt to the training stress. This leads to what we think of as overtraining.

From the standpoint of training response, it’s important to realize that all stressors add on to each other. Factors external to the training program (e.g., interpersonal relationships, nutrition, and school stress) can also affect the athlete’s ability to adapt to the stressors introduced by the training program.

This is why even knowing the sports science isn’t the only factor in achieving success. You may also need to work on your mental game. 

Next week, in the final part of this Sport Science for Soccer series, we’ll address the last two key principles you need to know.