Strength Training for Girls Soccer Players is NOT OVER-DOING It During the Season

In fact, playing soccer puts HIGHER FORCES on the tendons, joints, and bones and in a CHAOTIC environment.

Changes of direction movements in soccer happen in forces of up to 8x body weight! Sports are far more risky.

What’s over-doing in-season is grinding 5-7 days a week with soccer and skill sessions. It’s the same repetitive, high speed movements, that overuse the same exact muscle groups.

Whereas strength training, under supervision by a certified professional, does this:

– Controlled environment: puts girls in a controlled and gradually progressed environment with all eyes on them, teaching them movement quality and proper technique.

– Reduces force on joints: the forces placed on a young athlete’s joints and tendons occur mainly during jumping, running, and colliding in soccer. Slower strength movements are not as much impact as soccer playing, and are lowest risk for injury worsening or future injury.

– Builds tissue tolerance: strength training actively reduces the risk of future sports injuries making tissues more resilient to sport stressors. The quads, hamstrings, gluteals, core and upper body need to be loaded with weights over time so they build true strength and can safeguard their joints, ligaments and bones.

During the season, exercise selection and set/rep dosing is KEY in the gym.

If an athlete has a tendon/bone stress issue on one limb, I only select exercises that DO NOT CAUSE MORE PAIN. This is RULE #1 of strength programming: do no harm.

There’s hundreds of exercises I can choose from to strengthen the injury without causing harm, and rather, empowering the athlete, such as isometrics, bilateral work first, or training all other limbs to keep the body durable.

Or a girl with Osgood-Schlatter knee pain, posterior strength work focus – hamstrings and glutes, quad isometrics and controlled eccentrics that are tolerable, and all upper body strength movements are a green light!

The risk of over-doing is more in the soccer load due to the higher and unpredictable forces.

Most fatigue/pain/soreness comes from the hundreds of sprints and cuts players do in a game, not a 3×5 rep hex bar deadlift that is so low volume and places minimal stress on the knee joint lol. Sprints and cuts put far more mechanical stress on the knee than any movement in the gym.

I really wish more people understood this about strength training, especially with injury management.

Exercise selection, gradual progression, periodization and proper sets/reps can help athletes train around a current injury, or reduce risk of a future injury during the season.

At some point, girls soccer players need to BUILD THEIR CAPACITY to handle high loads in soccer.

Strength training is not over-doing. It is protective.

So here is my ideal recipe for in-season training: 1-2x a week on practice days, so that days off from practice are fully off. Ideally, 1-2 full off days a week, which should be a Friday because no one has team practice on Fridays, and then one weekend day when no games.

Please, do not schedule a skills session on a Sunday if there was a game the day before. Especially if it’s with Joe Schmo who has no understanding of load management, and who makes girls soccer players tap through agility rings the entire hour. Now THAT would be over-doing because the movements are repetitive impacts on the same muscle groups, bones and joints that also happened in the soccer game the day before.

Over-doing in-season is letting soccer and skill specific work DOMINATE your weekly schedule, with no balance of strengthening other muscle groups.

Think of strength training as a different sport and stimulus than soccer. The movements build other muscle groups, correct imbalances and movement compensations that cause injury, and are low to non-impact.