The Must-Have Qualities of a Women's Football Part 2 - Speed

Earlier this week I put up a post titled The Must Have Qualities of a Women's Footballer which viewed it's absolute ass off so I thought I better add to it.

In it I stated that after watching my first local-ish women's football match and comparing it to the many AFLW games I've seen, this is what I determined to be the qualities that could take you to the top if you can near perfect them.

1) Clean Hands of the Ground

2) Staying in the Contest

3) Physicality

4) Speed

3 of those qualities can be perfected at footy training and during games but 1 of them cannot.

That 1 of them is speed.

Have a gander at the image above and what do you think it tells you?

There's a lot of things football coaches know how to do but improving speed isn't one of them - hell a lot of personal trainers/strength coaches have a hard time doing it!

For women footballers in particular, many of them are a blank canvas when it comes to training adaptations.

What they generally do st footy training is what they will do on their own such as endurance/aerobic work.

Very rarely will they train with relatively heavy weights and very rarely will they train for maximum speed.

As a women's footballer do you know what this means?

It means that from all the endurance work you've performed, you're body is very efficient at performing aerobic type work and it's probably a strong suit of yours.

That's great but it's not even the best part.

The best part is that your body nervous system has been lying dormant all that time, waiting to be put into action via some form of maximum intensity effort.

You might think that you give maximum intensity during a game but that is false.

What give is maximum effort - that's completely different.

Maximum, or 100% intensity can only be displayed in a fully non-fatigued state which is only the case for your very first sprint for the game, if that.

Every other effort is of sub-maximal intensity because of the fatigue involved.

So without purposefully training maximum intensity then you will not train it at all.

Let's go back to the image above.

We have 2 players with one who can reach speeds of 10.5 meters per second and the other who can only reach speeds of 8.8 meters per second (don't worry about the actual numbers they're made up!).

As we mentioned above your 100% maximum effort will only be displayed once during a game unless you're sitting on the bench for 5 - 10mins at a time then you're thoroughly warming up for your next stint on the ground while you're there (doesn't happen!).

The next bar shows the speeds covered by each player at 70% of their max speed where the faster player can still reach speeds of 7.35ms vs 6.3m/s.

What does this mean?

As player 1 gets more fatigued they can still hit high speeds for sub maximal running because they're 100% is so high.

The higher your maximum speed, the faster your sub-maximal speed which is what you use most in footy.

By also increasing speed through optimal training methods you'll actually become more resistant to injuries as your running mechanics will be more efficient for longer.

You'll be far more ACL injury resistant as you'll have developed stiffness of the lower leg as well as hip stability and glute power.

You'll have an finely tuned nervous system which means everything will be potentially improved from a higher level of function.

The best part of speed training?

It's easy.

It's the easiest training session you'll do but you have to do it properly or all you're efforts can be in vain.

This means it's easy to add into your existing training schedule right now.

With the women's season not far away, NOW is the perfect time to do this!

The 2 week football training trial program I developed especially for female footballers will increase your maximum speed in as little as 4 - 6 weeks which would equate to about 6 - 9hrs extra total training over that 4 - 6 weeks.

The sessions that we can do in-person if you're local or online if you're not, and will have minimal interference with team footy training, the most important aspect of all your training.

If you're super keen then we can also add the aerobic component into it as well for a complete program!

In 4 - 6 weeks I can't see how a drop in half a second off your flying 20m, a quarter of a second off your standing 20m and also a few beats decreased from your resting heart rate (increasing aerobic capacity/endurance) can't happen.

Email at aussierulestraining@gmail.com, pm through the Facebook page or go right ahead in fill in the application form if you want those results before the season starts.