How to warm up for football/soccer?
The warm-up is always neglected by most football players in the world, because the attraction for the ball is much higher resulting in injuries, sometimes even serious. The warm up before training is essential, and that's what I barely realised at the age of 17 years, even though my dad always told me to make some moves before hitting the ball to prepare your body to cope suddenly when you hit the ball without you getting injured.
The warm-up is from my point of view, the most important in terms of injury prevention and the guarantee that you will provide a good physical performance during training. Depending on the time you have at your disposal to prepare your body for training, warming up may take between 10-30 minutes.
If you want to make a warm up that will allow you to start training without fear of injuries follow below the most used 3 methods to start warming before you hit the ball:
1. The easy running (at least 2 field laps)
⦁ Easy run is essential in starting the body preparation for the training, to which we can add during the jog rotation of the arms in the front and back, knees up in a slow movement , jogging, stepping, crossed step;
2. Mobility (This is not stretching)!
⦁ Start with front-back neck curls, touch the shoulder with the ear (left, right) and head turns (to the left and then to the right);
⦁ After that we begin with swings of the hips (left and right), bending with extended hands and open legs, and then walk to a few bends with the hands at the toes, with the legs stretched;
⦁ Left-right lunges with the bottom as close as possible to the grass to gain better mobility, as well as the front lunges (the knee does not exceed the toe) with both legs;
⦁ Spreading the legs as much as possible and starting to do a hand mill (be carefull not to flight away)
⦁ Grab one leg at a time and hold it with your heel at your ass for 10 seconds, Grab one knee at a time and hold it closer as possible to your chest;
3. Think about what the coach wants to achieve for today training session! (the mind must be also prepared)
⦁ An important thing is concentrating your attention on training, so you will retain the routes and exercises the coach wants;
⦁ Repeating each exercise has an important role to become an automatism, to do it without thinking how to kick the ball where you want it, when you want.
A good example is to think about how you brush your teeth each morning, your attention being elsewhere than how you brush your teeth, what is the right angle and how you need to move it, because the mind is on the autopilot doing this everyday becoming commonplace. That's why big footballers from the professional football leagues give some incredible passes, incredible goals, because it is the result of work every day of the training (tens or hundreds of thousands of kicks and passes).
If you practice each day in training to improve your skills, I guarantee that you will become much better, but it depends on you how long it will take to improve your skills (maybe 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years) because it is directly proportional to the work that you put in to it.
THE MOST IMPORTANT is to do the warm-up to prevent injuries and to get the maximum training performance and match by match.
by Ciprian Stoica