With pre-season training for college soccer players approximately 2 months away, I found a great column by Gavin Strachan of BBC Sport. Strachan is also a player with Notts County, and writes of the trials and tribulations of preparing for pre-season training.
The main reason clubs now expect their players to come back with an extremely high level of fitnesplayers were the first to throw up! Regardless of how many pre-season schedules you have endured one thing never changes - the horrible nervous feeling in the pit of your stomach before the first run. I am sure 99% of players will relate to this. I have not come up with one definitive reason why this is but I think it is a combination of not knowing how fit you are in relation to the other players and also the thought of what awaits you in the coming weeks of pre-season. s is that it gives them more scope to devote their pre-season training time to honing a team system for the season ahead and working on the technical side of things. This is illustrated by the fact that a lot of clubs now go straight into a degree of ballwork on the first day of pre-season training, or if not on the first day then certainly in the first week. In days gone by the unwritten rule was that you would not even set eyes on a football until the second or third week of your pre-season work.
There is also a greater emphasis on sports science now. For most clubs, the pre-season schedule is now overseen by specialist fitness coaches. When I first started, such figures were few and far between in the industry. Whereas heart-rate monitors are used now to chart every individual's performance levels in running sessions, the main yardstick before was which players were the first to throw up!
Regardless of how many pre-season schedules you have endured one thing never changes - the horrible nervous feeling in the pit of your stomach before the first run. I am sure 99% of players will relate to this. I have not come up with one definitive reason why this is but I think it is a combination of not knowing how fit you are in relation to the other players and also the thought of what awaits you in the coming weeks of pre-season.
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