Finding soccer drills that help muscle growth can be a great thing for players who want to build muscle while practicing soccer at the same time.
This sounds like a perfect formula and one would imagine that finding soccer drills that help muscle growth is an easy thing.
Maybe you thought that a simple Google search would suffice on your task of seeking soccer drills that help muscle growth.
Unfortunately, things aren’t as easy as that. You will see that finding soccer drills that help muscle growth can be a tricky thing.
Recently, in a post discussing Messi, we mentioned how he was able to score a header while marked by two tall giants players in Vidic and Ferdinand.
We are mentioning this to point out that soccer requires that you are agile, quick in movement and bombastic – attributes that usually do not go hand in hand with massive muscle.
Thus it is only logical to conclude that the majority of soccer drills are by design and by demand meant to improve agility and not as much to create muscular tearings that can bring muscle growth.
To find soccer drills that help muscle growth is going to be a challenging thing mostly because of that, however, we have tried to find something that might be useful.
Realistic Expectations And Understanding How Soccer Drills That Help Muscle Growth Work
To understand how soccer drills that help muscle growth work, we need to have a basic understanding on how muscle growth works.
If you ever find an amazing person, who is willing to help you build muscle, they will immediately tell you that muscle growth is 90% diet!
Granted, this hypothetical person needs to be immensely knowledgeable in this field, on top of being amazing enough to help.
This is all to say that muscle growth is very, very tightly connected to your diet and carb intake. Without eating the right food, all the training in the world won’t have much effect.
So if you want to find the right soccer drills that help with muscle growth you first need to make sure that everything else is in order.
You need to maximize your protein intake while decreasing the amount of saturated and generally unhealthy fats that you take.
That being said, the exercising part is of course very important too and you need to make sure that you do this side of the equation correctly too.
When you exercise you hurt your muscles by creating tearings within them. Our body then uses protein to fix these tearings.
Due to the fact that this process is so sophisticated, in fixing the tears our body also builds a better, bigger muscle than the one before.
So, what you need to do for these drills to work is to make sure that your dietary needs are being met and that you are eating the right type of food, taking enough protein, and so on.
You also need to keep in mind that soccer isn’t precisely a full body sport. As you already know, touching a football with your hands or arms is against the rules and punishable with a freekick or penalty.
The muscle group that will most likely see more growth through these techniques will be your leg muscles and there will be less effect on the upper body.
Number one: “Squat and Run!” – Squatting can help you a lot with running in general. As the exercise helps increase the strength of the muscles on your legs.
Squat and Run is a blending of these two. If you can find a soccer field, start at the corner flag. Do a few squats and once you feel ready sprint to the middle of the pitch.Once there, stop, and go for another set of squats.
You can either take a pause here, or you can take another spirit all the way to the other corner and then go for another round of squatting.
We are intentionally being vague as far as the number of sets and reps is considered. We believe that is best decided by you. See how far you can go, and decide how far you want to push.
We also recommended sprinting, but that isn’t absolutely necessary, you can instead opt for jogging from one end to the other.
For enhanced results you can even hold weights while squatting. You can place them at the corner flag and the middle of the pitch and then run inbetween for your sets.
Number Two: “The Romelu Lukaku” – Lukaku, the Belgian who currently plays for Chelasea, is one of the buffest soccer players out there.
He once mentioned that during training, whenever he missed a shot, he had to do 10 push ups as a punishment to make up for his poor shooting. You can now see where we are going with this.
You can do this while practicing free kicks, or while trying to learn a new shooting technique. Maybe by the end you will grow muscle and learn the knuckleball.
This is something that you can implement even on your own training routine, and not use specifically as a drill.
You can do precisely what Lukaku did and do push-ups every time that you miss a shot in training.
Keep your options broad though and keep in mind that you can use this to train your crossing or even passing technique too.
Number Three: “Shadow Boxing and Boxing Training” – Okay, this is going to be a controversial one. We totally understand that!
The reason why we included shadow boxing in our list of soccer drills that help muscle growth is because this exercise is great for many things.
First of all it is a great way of working out your arms, on top of that it can help build endurance, and on top of it all it can be helpful for balance and hand eye coordination.
All of these are things that can come really handy during a soccer match. Your balance and endurance are very important for soccer performance.
The fact that shadow boxing is great for muscle growth too, makes this the perfect candidate for a list like the ones we are compiling today.
You can use this as a warm up drill, or something that you do after your actual training is done. Although pro athletes would probably not use something like this, it doesn’t make it useless.
Keep in mind that we are trying to maximize the gains from our training. Shadow boxing may have been invented for something else but if it works, it works!
At the end of the day, we must point out that soccer players do other sorts of training and working out to build muscle.
If you recall that Cristiano Ronaldo celebration, of him pulling his shorts up and pointing at his calves, you might also recall why he did it.
He explained that he did it to joke with one of the goalkeepers on the team, who refused to do bodybuilding exercises on top of regular soccer workouts.
To achieve the results that he has, you should follow his style and add multiple dimensions to your work out routine.
