1. Train your butt and hamstrings using glut-ham curl variations, back extensions, reverse hypers, RDL variations, olympic lifts (if you know how) and box squats.  Most soccer players lack strength and power in their posterior chain and this causes faulty movement patterns and sub-par structural balance.

2.  Single leg exercises are huge and you should be using them. Stick to reps between 4-15 and try to progress your weights. Some of my favorites are rear foot elevated split squats, walking lunges, reverse lunges, side lunges, single leg rdls, step ups to boxes of various heights, and the dreaded pistols. Get stronger on those and watch your athleticism increase.

3. Eat less bread and pasta.  Gluten will eff you up, period. It will make your brain slower, body recover slower, and bread and pasta put on the fat pounds that high level athletes don’t need because they are easy to over eat and they increase insulin which increases the storage of fat. Fat will not help you run fast.

4.  Train your calves. Most good athletes have well developed calves.  Use full range of motion and they will also help increase mobility at the ankle joint. Many of us soccer players develop stiff achilles and calf muslces which can cause problems with squat depth, hip pain, etc. So stretch them for sure, but train them for strength as well.

5.  Run on the balls of your feet unless you are stopping or changing directions. There is no reason when sprinting or running in a straight line to ever allow heel strike to occur before the ball of the foot.  When stopping or changing directions,  placing the whole foot down helps with the breaking mechanism.  Ball of the foot striking makes us faster and takes advantage of the spring effect of the achilles tendon.

6.  Train the glutes in the horizontal axis. Reverse Hypers, horizontal back ext., hip thrusts are all great at hitting the glutes in this manner, a way that is important for the act of sprinting. 

• Increasing velocity from 60 to 100% of maximum running velocity appears to be more dependent on horizontal force production as opposed to vertical force production. Future research should investigate the effects of various training interventions on increasing horizontal force production and stride length, and their effects on maximum running velocity. In addition, stride length may have more of an influence of maximum velocity running than was once thought. It may be that assessment procedures need to place greater emphasis on horizontal force production and also a battery of tests that allows diagnosis of an athlete’s strengths and weaknesses in both the vertical and horizontal directions would be beneficial in individualizing programs. In terms of sprint specific strength and power development, exercises that concentrate on force production in the horizontal directions may well lead to greater speed development, given that most exercises in the weight training room accentuate force production in the vertical plane. (Brughelli)


• In other words, it seems that the importance is not so much the amount of total force produced, but the way it is oriented onto the supporting ground during the acceleration phase of the sprint. Since this may be considered a technical ability, further studies should investigate whether it could be trained/improved, by what practical means, and whether the training exercises typically used by coaches to train athletes to “push forward for a greater distance” actually and efficiently do so. (Morin)


• Given that adaptations to resistance training have been shown to be specific to the constraints of training exercises, those exercises that mimic the sprint-running technique may be more beneficial than “traditional” resistance-training exercises in improving sprintspecific strength. (Blazevich)


• Currently, most gym-based resistance programs focus on exercises that principally work the leg musculature in a vertical plane. It is proposed that the transference of gym-based strength gains may be improved if exercises were used that involve both vertical and horizontal force production. That is, if successful performance requires force, velocity, and power (product of force and velocity) in the horizontal plane,  improvements may be realized if the design of the resistance training program focuses on horizontal movement-specific exercises as well as traditional vertical exercises. To date, however, the effectiveness of a gymbased lower-body resistance training program with a horizontal component has not been investigated. (Randell)