Injury Prevention for Soccer
Injury Reduction is one of the two primary goals of training. The other goal of training being improve performance. If your only goal is performance improvement your chances of getting injured multiply.
You will notice I said Injury reduction not prevention. You can do a lot to reduce the incidence of injury but freak accidents will always happen. You can’t always control jumping up and landing on an opponents foot.
Injury reduction happens on two fronts. First, your actual training needs to be done in a manner to reduce the likelihood of injury during training. This means that squating, bench pressing, 1 v 1 drills, small sided games etc should all be done in a way that does not cause injury. The second way to reduce injury is using your training program to build a body resistant to injury.
Action Plan
To reduce injury follow these guidelines. By no means is it an all inclusive list but it will get you started.
- Warm up well
- Stretch well
- Activate your glutes using band walks and quadruped
- When strength training never bend on proper technique
- Allow for rest. Overtraining is bad
- Implement plyometrics properly
- Do plyometrics
- Learn to land correctly without the knees caving inward
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