Football training

Chances are, like most UK residents, you've been following football from when you were small. It's not called "The Beautiful Game" for nothing - when it's well executed, the grace an agility of football players is beautiful to watch. But behind all that skill is a lot of hard work. Whether you play football professionally or just belong to a local league, if you want to improve your skills, you need to be constantly engaged in sports specific training programme. Taking care to develop your skills off the football pitch will pay dividends during a match.

Football places a very specific set of demands on the body which need to be taken into account when you're compiling a sport specific training programme. To play the game well, the average player requires:

• Extremely explosive sprint starts
• Fast sprinting speed
• A high level of agility and body-space awareness
• A great deal of lower body muscle strength and endurance
• A high level of neuro-muscular co-ordination
• A well-developed and evenly distributed muscle mass
• Supple and flexible muscle tone
• A balance of strength between the quadriceps and the hamstrings

Taking these needs into account, a good sport specific training programme should include exercises that focus on speed, strength building, explosive energy bursts and flexibility. Doing the pylometric circuit, which incorporates short bursts of various different activities such as push-ups, lunges and jumping rope, focuses on building explosive energy bursts and releases. It's also very important to do shuttle sprints of various lengths. A series of circuits, such as leg, upper body and abdominal circuits, incorporate a series of exercises including lifts, bends, extensions and contractions that help build muscular endurance.

Programmes such as Yoga and Pilates can also be great for this sport, because they build core strength and endurance while encouraging flexibility. Lastly, strength training of the upper and lower body is required. In this sport, it is especially important to maintain a balance on muscle in both the upper and lower body in order to facilitate speed and agility on the field.