Strength Training for Soccer Players

Strength training makes soccer players faster, more powerful, and harder to injure. A large meta-analysis of highly trained male youth players found that strength, plyometric, and combined training all produced moderate to large improvements in lower-body strength, jumping power, acceleration, and change-of-direction speed. The performance case is settled, but the practical questions remain wide open: which exercises, how often, where in the weekly schedule, and how to avoid turning a midfielder into a sluggish bodybuilder. Those details matter far more than whether to lift at all.

What Strength Training Actually Improves on the Pitch

The most immediate and measurable benefit is sprint acceleration. In a study of soccer players who added heavy squats to their regular training, five-meter sprint times dropped from about 1.11 seconds to 1.05 seconds, ten-meter times improved from 1.83 to 1.78 seconds, and twenty-meter times went from 3.09 to 3.05 seconds. Those fractions of a second sound tiny, but in a foot race for a through ball they’re the difference between getting there first and watching someone else score. The same study found that maximal squat strength rose from roughly 125 kg to 149 kg over the training period, and the researchers noted that the sprint gains tracked closely with the strength gains.¹

Beyond straight-line speed, a systematic review and meta-analysis covering high-level youth players confirmed that strength-based training also improved countermovement jump height, horizontal power, and change-of-direction speed, with moderate effect sizes across the board. The researchers were especially confident that future programs would reliably improve jumping, horizontal explosiveness, and acceleration.² In practical terms, this means winning aerial duels, exploding past a defender, and changing direction without losing momentum.

The Injury Prevention Side

If performance gains get players excited about the weight room, injury prevention should keep them there. Hamstring strains are the single most common injury in professional soccer, and they tend to recur. The Nordic hamstring exercise, a bodyweight eccentric drill where you slowly lower yourself from a kneeling position, has become the poster child for hamstring injury prevention. A meta-analysis of programs that included the Nordic hamstring exercise found that hamstring injury rates dropped by about half compared with teams that used no prevention program at all.³ A randomized controlled trial in amateur players confirmed that incorporating Nordics significantly reduced how often hamstring injuries occurred, though it did not change the severity of the injuries that still happened.⁴

Groin injuries are the other chronic headache for soccer players. The Copenhagen adduction exercise, a side-plank variation where a partner holds your top leg while you raise and lower your body using your inner thigh, targets the adductor muscles eccentrically. A randomized trial found that adding the Copenhagen exercise to the FIFA 11+ warm-up program produced roughly a 9% greater increase in eccentric hip adduction strength compared with the standard 11+ alone.⁵ In players who already had groin pain, another trial showed the Copenhagen exercise significantly increased adduction strength and reduced reported pain.⁶

ACL tears are less frequent than hamstring and groin injuries but far more devastating. Female soccer players face particularly high ACL risk, and a growing body of evidence points to unilateral strength training as a way to reduce it. In a preliminary study of female soccer players, a ten-week individualized program of single-leg strength work improved change-of-direction mechanics dramatically: the proportion of players classified as high-risk dropped from 82% to zero, with notable improvements in knee alignment, foot placement, and trunk stability.⁷

Bilateral Versus Unilateral Exercises

One common debate is whether soccer players should prioritize two-legged lifts like back squats and deadlifts or single-leg exercises like rear-foot-elevated split squats and single-leg Romanian deadlifts. Soccer is mostly a single-leg sport: you sprint off one foot, kick off one foot, and plant on one foot when changing direction. That reality has pushed many coaches toward unilateral-dominant programming.

A study of elite youth soccer players compared a bilateral training group (emphasizing back squats) with a unilateral group (emphasizing rear-foot-elevated split squats). Both groups improved, but the improvements showed distinct patterns. The bilateral group saw bigger gains in back squat strength, while the unilateral group saw greater improvements in single-leg drop jump performance and a change-of-direction test on one side. Neither approach was universally superior.⁸ The practical takeaway is that most well-designed soccer strength programs include both. Bilateral lifts build a foundation of maximal strength efficiently, while unilateral work addresses side-to-side imbalances and more closely mirrors what actually happens on the pitch.

Why Eccentric Strength Deserves Special Attention

Eccentric strength, the ability to produce force while a muscle is lengthening, matters enormously in soccer. Every time you decelerate from a sprint, plant and cut, or absorb a landing, your muscles are working eccentrically. A review of the research found moderate to large correlations between eccentric strength and change-of-direction speed in athletes, and the authors recommended that coaches in sports with high change-of-direction demands, soccer being named explicitly, should include training that emphasizes the eccentric phase.⁹

An in-season study put this to the test with semi-professional soccer players. A group that performed “enhanced negative work” training, meaning they used heavier loads on the lowering phase of each rep, improved agility T-test times and shuttle run performance significantly, while a group doing standard weight training saw no meaningful change in those tests.¹⁰ The likely explanation is that heavier eccentric loading improves a player’s ability to brake, which is the limiting factor when you need to stop quickly and go in a different direction.

Core Training and Kicking Power

Core strength gets a lot of lip service in soccer, but the evidence is more nuanced than the Instagram highlight reels suggest. A study of adolescent male players found that an eight-week core stability program significantly improved ball-kicking velocity and sprint speed compared with a control group, though the between-group difference in agility did not reach statistical significance.¹¹ A study with elite youth players found similar results: trunk extensor strength improved by about 5%, kicking performance improved modestly, and the ten-to-twenty-meter sprint segment got roughly 3% faster after core training, regardless of whether the exercises were done on stable or unstable surfaces.¹²

The picture that emerges is that core work genuinely contributes to kicking power and sprint performance, but it is not a magic bullet for agility. It works best as a complement to lower-body strength training rather than a replacement for it. A handful of planks and deadbugs in the warm-up, supplemented by the anti-rotation and anti-extension demands of exercises like single-leg squats and Romanian deadlifts, covers most players’ core needs without eating into limited gym time.

Fitting Strength Work Into a Soccer Week

The biggest logistical challenge is scheduling. Soccer players have matches, sometimes two per week, plus tactical sessions, recovery protocols, and travel. Strength sessions have to slot in without compromising readiness for the next game.

A survey of professional team sport practitioners found that most programs observe a roughly 48-hour recovery window after matches before introducing any training stimulus. The vast majority of resistance training sessions were done concurrently with field work, typically in the afternoon after a morning pitch session. Practitioners in sports with congested schedules, which describes most competitive soccer leagues, reported prescribing strength training only about one and a half times per week on average and expressed less satisfaction with their ability to maintain strength and power than coaches in less congested sports.¹³

Timing around match day matters. A study in female soccer players found that performing resistance training 48 hours after a match tended to suppress recovery of speed and power at the 72-hour mark, making it a less-than-ideal window, especially when another match is approaching.¹⁴ Research on youth players echoed this, showing that a high-volume, high-intensity session 48 hours after a match negatively affected physical performance compared with a reduced session.¹⁵ The emerging consensus for a one-game-per-week schedule is to place the main strength session on match day plus three or match day plus four, when the player is recovered enough to train hard but still has time to recover before the next game. During congested weeks with two matches, the best you can manage is usually a maintenance session of lower volume.

Periodization Across a Season

A common approach is to build strength during preseason and maintain it during the competitive season. But how you periodize through the season can affect both performance and injury rates. A nine-month study compared a traditional periodization model, where exercises were repeated systematically, with what the researchers called “integral periodization,” which varied exercises to compensate for the physical demands experienced in matches. Both groups improved in strength, sprint speed, and change-of-direction performance. However, the integral approach produced significantly better results in 10-meter sprints, 30-meter sprints, and a change-of-direction test, and also led to fewer non-contact injuries over the full season.¹⁶

The lesson is that cookie-cutter programs that ignore what happened in the last match or training week are leaving performance and health on the table. Coaches who adjust exercises and loads based on recent match demands seem to get better outcomes than those who march through a spreadsheet regardless of context.

A related finding involves combining strength work with high-intensity interval training. Professional players who performed both heavy squats and high-intensity running intervals twice per week during preseason improved vertical jump, sprint times, and aerobic capacity all at once, without gaining body mass.¹⁷ The old worry that strength and endurance training would cancel each other out does not hold up in soccer-specific contexts, especially when the endurance work is interval-based rather than long slow runs. A randomized trial in young players found that the order in which strength and endurance were performed in the same session did not have a major impact on most fitness measures, though performing endurance before strength showed a slight edge for linear sprint speed.¹⁸

Strength Training for Youth Players

Parents and youth coaches sometimes worry that lifting weights will stunt growth or cause injuries in younger players. The evidence does not support those fears. An eight-week study of young adolescent soccer players found that both free-weight resistance training and plyometric training produced significant improvements in muscle strength and jump performance. Isometric peak torque increased by roughly 23% in the resistance training group and 16% in the plyometric group, and both groups gained similar amounts of muscle thickness.¹⁹

Another study of early-adolescent players found that an integrative neuromuscular training program, which combined strength, balance, and movement-quality exercises, improved 10- and 20-meter sprint times, jumping, change of direction, and even shooting speed over eight weeks. Players in the control group who did only standard soccer training actually saw some of these qualities deteriorate over the same period.²⁰ That last point is often overlooked: in growing athletes, soccer training alone is not enough to develop the physical qualities needed for the game. Without supplementary strength work, some capacities can actually decline during a competitive season.

For teams that do not have access to a qualified strength coach or a weight room, a “dynamic-ecological” approach using game-based conditioning showed encouraging results in under-13 players, improving horizontal explosive strength, sprint ability, and shuttle run performance with high effect sizes.²¹ The barrier to entry for youth strength development is lower than many coaches assume.

Flywheel and Isoinertial Devices

One piece of equipment that has gained traction in professional soccer is the flywheel training device. Unlike traditional weights, where the resistance is constant, a flywheel provides inertial resistance that can produce an eccentric overload: the device pulls back harder on the way down than you pushed on the way up. A six-week study of young soccer players using a flywheel device during sport-specific exercises found significant improvements in jump height, agility (Illinois test), linear sprinting, and even shooting accuracy compared with players who did conventional soccer training only.²²

However, flywheel devices are not universally magical. A study on professional soccer players performing flywheel leg curls and hip extensions found that meaningful eccentric overload, where the lowering phase actually exceeds the lifting phase in peak power, occurred only in the hip-extension exercise and only for peak power, not average power.²³ The take-home is that flywheel training can be a valuable tool, particularly for sport-specific eccentric loading and for teams that travel and need portable equipment, but the assumed eccentric overload does not automatically happen with every exercise on the device. Exercise selection and execution still matter.

Match Day Priming Sessions

A less-discussed application of resistance-based work is the match day priming session. Rather than resting completely before a game, some elite teams have players perform a light morning routine that includes stretching, mobility, core exercises, lower-body resistance movements, and reactive agility drills. A study of elite-level competitive matches found that games preceded by a morning priming session saw players cover more total distance, more high-intensity running distance, and engage in more duels, with no negative effect on technical performance.²⁴ The stimulus is light enough not to fatigue the player but potent enough to “wake up” the neuromuscular system before kickoff.

Upper Body Work and Tendon Health

Soccer is officially classified as a contact and collision sport, with aerial challenges, shoulder-to-shoulder duels, and shielding the ball forming a constant part of play. Yet upper-body training is frequently neglected. Researchers have noted that winning physical duels, shielding the ball, and fending off opponents all require upper-body strength and power, and that even low-frequency upper-body resistance training during a competitive season can maintain or improve these qualities.²⁵ You do not need to bench press three times a week, but a couple of sets of pressing, pulling, and loaded carries each week can pay dividends in physical confrontations and injury resilience through the trunk and shoulders.

Tendon health is another underappreciated dimension. High-intensity resistance training during preseason improved patellar tendon stiffness in professional female soccer players, and combining that training with collagen supplementation amplified the effect: tendon stiffness increased by about 15% in the collagen group compared with roughly 5% in the group that trained without supplementation.²⁶ Stiffer tendons transfer force more efficiently and are more resilient to the repeated loading that soccer demands. This is especially relevant during preseason, when training volumes spike and tendon injuries tend to emerge.

Velocity-Based Training and Monitoring Readiness

One growing trend among professional clubs is using barbell velocity monitors, small devices that attach to the bar and measure how fast it moves, to autoregulate training loads. Rather than prescribing a fixed percentage of a one-rep max, coaches set a target bar speed. If the player moves the bar quickly, they’re fresh and can train heavier. If the bar moves slowly, fatigue is present and the load is reduced or the session is cut short. This approach allows coaches to control fatigue within a set and across sessions, and it doubles as a readiness assessment without the need for a formal max-strength test.²⁷ For a sport where the primary concern is always “will this gym session hurt my performance on Saturday,” velocity-based training offers a useful safety valve. A related application is using creatine monohydrate supplementation to maintain power output during demanding preseason blocks: a study of Brazilian elite players found that creatine prevented the decline in lower-limb power that typically accompanies progressive preseason training loads.²⁸