As you get into the deep parts of your seasons, as the dense game and practice schedules can start to add up, great players can start to realize that as important as it is to give your best efforts in training each week, it’s also critical to do what you can to help your body stay healthy and powerful. One of my favorite research studies looked at what it took for elite level athletes to achieve their goals each season… and the biggest factor was simply being able to attend at least 80% of all practices and competitions. Drop below that number, and it was very difficult for athletes to reach the goals they had set before the season; hit that goal, and their success rate skyrocketed. As we’ve said before in this space, the best ability is AVAILability.
In previous blogs, we’ve introduced activities you can put in your warm-ups and do on your own to build strength, mobility, and power in the muscles most commonly used in athletic movement, specifically addressing the muscles of the insides of your legs (adductors) and the muscles of the outer hips (posterior lateral corner). Today, we keep that focus on helping you become a better, more well-rounded, more injury resistant player, and focus on another critical muscle group used in sports, the muscles on the back of your thighs, your hamstrings.
Your hamstrings are some of the most important players in a wide, wide range of athletic abilities, including everything from impacting your maximum sprint speed to helping prevent knee injuries. My first mentor, a coach who has run Olympic Training Centers for two different nations and is currently the Head Strength Coach for Melbourne City FC in the A-League, always says that “you don’t see an athlete when they’re walking to you, you see an athlete when they’re walking way from you”, meaning that it’s the muscles on the backs of our bodies – our upper backs, low backs, glutes, and hamstrings – that drive better on-field athleticism. As such important muscles that are so heavily involved in athletic movements, hamstrings are also one of the most commonly injured areas for soccer players; at the collegiate level, soccer teams experience 1.56-3.23 injuries per team/per year (meaning around 1.5 to 3 players have a hamstring injury each season), with the average time missed for a hamstring injury being 12.9 days to 16 weeks!
If you’re looking to make yourself the best athlete you can be, properly training your hamstrings must be a part of that process. Here are three drills that you can incorporate into your warm-ups and your supplemental training to help improve the injury resistance and power potential in your hamstrings:
The Inverted Toe Touch - Walking, is a great early warm-up activity that preps your hamstrings to move more dynamically. These are also great in that they include a stability element for the hips, knees, and ankles, addressing multiple aspects of your athleticism at once. Try these for 1-2 sets of 5-10 repetitions each leg.
The Straight Leg Skip Series is a progression of movements that can go near the end of your warm-up and can serve as a tremendous activity to prepare your hamstrings for the explosive, dynamic movements you’ll do during a soccer game. Done properly, they also reinforce key aspects of proper maximum velocity sprinting mechanics, helping to improve sprinting speed. Try each of these movements at the end of your warm-up for 1-2 sets over 10 yards-30 yards.
Lastly, the Single Leg, Straight Leg, Bridge is low-equipment, easy set-up, hamstring strengthening activity you can do on your own. When these are done with proper form (most importantly, a great core posture), these can be a very simple, but also very effective movement for building the specific strength needed to move better, and increase your injury resistance, on the soccer field. Try these 1-2 days per week, for 1-3 sets of 5-20 repetitions each leg.
And there you have it! Some simple activities you can do during the warm-up period and on your own to address one of the most essential muscle groups of the body for soccer players, the hamstrings. The next time you head out for a warm-up, or are working on your game on your own time, try these activities out and see how you feel!
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us through our Contact page here and, for more general and sport-specific training information, visit our Instagram at: atsc_solutions. We also have a vault of proven, effective programs that we implemented at the Division I and professional sports levels for purchase on our Products page here. And if you’re looking to take your game to your highest levels, click here and let’s work together either in-person if you’re in the Cape Fear area or here if you’re interested in our individually-specific online training!
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