How to Keep Your Stamina During a Game?

One of the challenges football players face is taking their fitness up a level. These are already supreme athletes at the near edge of physical ability. However, those who can touch that edge can often translate that onto the field and boost their in-game levels of performance. In this article, we’ll look at how football players can take endurance to its peak.

What’s great about building endurance is it is something extremely easy to do. It is all about making small gains and just working out. If you want to improve your endurance for football, there are some simple steps to take your fitness to the next level.

Before getting into it, there are a few things you need to consider:

• There are no quick fixes in fitness. If you have goals to get near peak performance, then you must understand it takes time. However, you will be able to see each small gain you make while you’re on that journey.
• Before starting a regimen to boost your stamina, you should honestly assess your current aerobic base, strength capabilities, and general fitness. Burnout can happen even for athletes who already have a strong fitness level and you want to avoid overtraining.
• Building endurance comes in many guises. When people typically talk about endurance or stamina, they a thinking about running. However, for a football player, running is only part of the equation. Certainly, being able to do more sprints and for longer will help, but strength also plays a major role in football, so endurance on the weights is also necessary.

Stay Consistent

Athletes already know the benefits of consistency in training. In fact, that’s the whole point of training sessions for any sport, allowing athletes to hone their skills and be in the best condition for game time. Endurance training is no different, whether on the weight bench or the treadmill. Consistent training is the only way to do it, after-all you are trying to build something and fitness is built brick by brick, step by step. That means hitting the gym or the track 3 or 4 times a week for around 30 minutes without fail with the sole purpose of endurance training.

Embrace Long Runs

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The longer you run the more endurance you have. It’s a simple equation. To build endurance, one of the best ways to start is by simply extending your runs. Whether you add 5 to 10 minutes or 0.5 to 1 mile, you will be pushing your normal capacity. Don’t get stuck into a new rut though, so aim to increase your runs every week by time or distance. One long run per week should also be a part of your regime. This is a run that is significantly farther than your usual daily distance and should take above 30% of your total weekly running miles.

High Intensity Training

Running longer will help you to boost stamina, but football is not just about gentle running. It is about a lot of full on sprinting, undulating cardio loads, and stop start high intensity bursts. Long running can help, but it won’t help you when those in-game sprints start piling up. That’s why you need to add high intensity interval training (HIIT) to your workload.

Also know as tempo runs, HIIT is when you do significantly shorter running distances but go at full sprint (or close to) capacity. A HIIT distance may only be 100 meters, but the idea is you break the exercise into intervals, sprinting 100 meters and walking off 100 meters before repeating. Distances and sprint times can change, while how many minutes you do a HIIT session can also differ. Prepare to be exhausted, but also prepare to see some obvious gains as the weeks pass.