Soccer Speed Training Exercises for Stronger Kicks and Faster Running Speed

 

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Hello and welcome to the soccer kick farther and run faster speed training challenge. Our challenge for you today is to try just three exercises from our soccer speed training program to see if you can become a faster runner and stronger kicker in just 14 days.

That's it…just 14 days to see how much you can kick the ball harder and farther, get to the ball quicker on the field and flat out just become a more dominant soccer player that will help you get the attention of scouts and coaches and possibly earn a college scholarship and maybe even a professional contract.

The exercises I am about to show you will only take 3 minutes a day, each, to perform and since you will only need to do 3 exercises, you are looking at just 9 minutes of training time per day….certainly you can make time for that, especially if it helps improve your game, even if you are already an all-star soccer player.

Let me first give you a little insight into why these 3 exercises are going to work so well for you and then we will get in to the exercises themselves.

To start things off, let's briefly talk about your hip joint, the most powerful and most important joint in the body when it comes to sports. Did you know there are 6 basic planes of motion for the hip joint?

6 basic ways to exercise it? There are and they consist of: extension, flexion, abduction, adduction, external rotation and internal rotation.

Now of these 6 planes of motion, the majority of athletes, including professionals really only train their hip joint to function properly in just 3 of them at the most?

It's true. Most athletes that I've been around train their hip joint primarily for hip extension, to target their glutes and hamstrings, by doing exercises such as squats, lunges, leg presses, dead lifts, box jumps, and power cleans. You may be doing the same.

Now these are all great exercises, however they only focus on one of the six planes of motion, just one and that again is hip extension.

Now these same athletes that I've been around are somewhat familiar with training 2 other planes of hip motion, those being hip abduction and hip adduction primarily because they have at least been exposed to the abductor and adductor machines that train these muscles in the gym.

But I can tell you that even their training in these two areas is severely limited to only what the machines can offer.

Which brings us to the other 3 planes of hip motion: external rotation of the hip: internal rotation of the hip and hip flexion.

Can you honestly tell me that you have ever seen any piece of gym equipment anywhere that will help you train for internal and external hip rotation? I've never seen any such piece of equipment.

So, my guess is that since this equipment is missing from the gym, you too have probably never once given any thought to training your hip for internal and external rotation…ever!

That's 2 planes of hip motion, out of 6, or 33% of hip joint function, that you are completely omitting! And remember, the hip joint is the most powerful joint in the body and extremely important for soccer players.

33% of hip function missing from your training routine and up until now you were probably wondering "what more can I do to get better?" Well, I think you have at least some idea now.

And just take a guess what having strong internal and external hip rotator muscles just might help you with? That's right! One of them is running, especially your change of direction and reaction speed.

The other place where your hip rotators are used is in kicking. As shown here.

Are you with me so far? Good, because here is where our soccer training challenge gets even more interesting.

The 6th and final plane of motion for the hip joint is hip flexion. You probably already know that hip flexion is the opposite motion of hip extension. And you probably already know, or have at least performed some exercises for your hip flexors, such has sit-ups and hanging knee-raises. But here are a couple of things you may not have known about your hip flexors:

First, there are 7 of them that flex the hip joint on each side of the body and contrary to what some people believe, these muscles aren't tiny and small but rather, they are the longest muscle group in the body!

Their combined length is almost 3 feet long where they begin high up in your lumbar spine and attach just below the knee. so, That's a lot of muscle!

Now these 7 hip flexor muscles on each side of your body are responsible for the speed and length of your running stride and contribute a lot to your turnover rate, that is, how fast your leg cycles around, when you run.

So, they are very important to your running speed on the soccer field. They are also a main factor in kicking as they are needed to aggressively pull your leg from behind you, forward to enable your lower leg and foot to make powerful contact with the ball.

But here is something you may not have known: you can't exercise all 7 of your hip flexors properly if all you ever do are sit-ups and hanging knee raises; at best you will only ever target 2 of these 7, and those are the psoas and iliacus muscles. And this has to do with where these other 5 muscles originate and insert on the body that require different thigh and lower leg positions in order to engage them within an exercise.

So, even when you think you are effectively training your hip flexors, you are most likely leaving 5 of them out and not even coming close to tapping in to their full potential.

Now, if that's sounds like a big oversight, here is one that may be even bigger: your athletic performance is only as good as your weakest link.

What that means is that if one muscle group, such as your hip extensors where your glutes and hams are on the back side is more developed than its counterpart, such as your hip flexors on the front side, your body's own built-in self-defense mechanism will be forced to find a way to prevent injury to these weaker hip flexors just so they will be able to keep up the pace.

And it will do this by automatically shortening your stride, or forcing you to return your foot back down to the ground sooner than you are hoping for.

That means that all of the hard training you may be currently putting in to the backside of your thigh for your glutes and hams will not be as helpful to you as you were led to believe.

So, what we need to do is completely strengthen your hip flexors to counter the strength of the powerful hip extensors so they both function at optimum efficiency. When you do this, you are going to find yourself running more faster and with greater ease, like flying in the wind, which is what everyone wants!

Plus, since the hip flexors play a major role in kicking, your kicking power and kicking distance will naturally increase as well. And of course, we have an exercise here to help you increase the strength within these muscles.

So, there you have it; a brief overview of why if you do the three exercises shown in this video for your hip flexors, internal hip rotators and external hip rotators, the way we teach you, you can't help but improve your running speed and kicking distance and your overall soccer performance.

These three exercises are also part of a larger group of exercises contained in our Soccer Speed Training Program, so if you think you have gotten faster and can kick farther after doing just these three of them for only 14 days, imagine how much more running speed and kicking distance you will gain if you did the whole program!