Conditioning for sport

[Wayne]

In a recent podcast reference was made to Austin’s sporting background including soccer. As someone who plays a bit of amateur soccer weekly with friends and wants to improve in-game stamina, what type of conditioning and subsequent progression of this would you recommend to have the best carry over?

Resistance training is my main focus and I don’t want to detract from this, but I thought it might make cardio more engaging if I could tie it into sport performance.

I’ve recently been doing 20 rounds of 30s on / 30s off on the air bike to emulate sprint conditions with some success, but I was considering longer work periods (e.g max calories in 5 or 10 mins) to improve match-duration endurance outwith sprint scenarios.

Any thoughts welcomed - thanks for all the material you guys put out.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

Wayne,

If it were me I'd plan to have a longer duration aerobic component once per week and then some aerobic intervals once per week. I wouldn't spend any time doing sprint intervals for a recreational soccer player who is doing lots of resistance training.

So, something in the 25-45 min range steady state @ RPE 6 and something that looks like 90-180 seconds @ RPE 9, followed by 2 minutes rest, repeating that for ~20 minutes or so.

It should also be pointed out that there's a huge interindividual difference in how people respond to various training programs so this is all subject to change.

-Jordan

[Wayne]

Thanks for the reply Jordan. I’ll incorporate your suggestion and see how I respond.