Youth Soccer Strengthening Exercises

Immerse yourself in our expertly crafted exercise video, showcasing essential movements to improve strength and coordination.

Exercise dosage refers to the specific amount of exercise prescribed for an individual or group, typically defined by several key variables. It is used to ensure that exercises are performed at the appropriate intensity, frequency, and duration to achieve desired health, fitness, or rehabilitation goals while minimizing both under stimulating sessions and risk of injury.

The depth at which you can optimize an individual’s exercise dosage is extensive, and what makes working with a Physical Therapist so impactful.

However, there are general recommendations we can provide that considers not only results and safety, but also being accessible to a wide range of conditioning levels and ages. 

Next, is that fatigue matters! if you felt like your last repetition felt just as easy as your first, then it’s likely that was an under stimulating dose. A non-fatiguing dose could be helpful for coordination and perfecting form, but will likely be insufficient to stimulate significant tissue growth (ie. muscle, tendon, bone). 

You should feel a mild burn in the target muscle, and feel like it’s a struggle to maintain good form. Maintaining good form is there to help prevent you from getting injured, so do not sacrifice form for more repetitions. If you feel a slight burn in the muscle, and you’re getting a little wobbly, you’ve likely stimulated your muscle tissue sufficiently. 

You should be fatigued generally between 8-12 repetitions or 10-30 seconds for static hold exercises. Generally speaking, if you’re unable to meet the suggested lower repetition range, you should decrease the resistance/load, and vice versa on the upper end. 

If this is your first time doing this routine, or if it’s been more than 5-7 days since your last attempt, we recommend that you start with just doing at most 1 set of each exercise. 

Don’t forget to allow your body time to recover! Muscle soreness can be a helpful indicator of if a dosage was appropriate or not. Very mild soreness that only lasts 1-2 days is an ideal response. 

If you feel severe soreness, unable to move joints through full range of motion, or if it lasts 3+ days, you should decrease your dosage, either in load, sets, or reps. 

Be considerate of this recovery time and plan ahead!

If you have a physically demanding activity on your calendar within this recovery window, consider lowering your dosage to accommodate for that activity. The safest thing we would recommend is to NOT perform this routine within 3 days of any competition, in order to avoid exposing recovering muscle/tendon tissue to an unpredictable athletic environment. 

Now, step it up!

What’s really exciting about young and novice athletes, is that they respond very rapidly and significantly to exercise stimulus. However, as you grow stronger the stimulating dosage requirement also goes up. You’ll need to continue increasing your dosage to continue providing a sufficient stimulus for your muscle tissue to continue progressing.

You can increase your dosage in the form of load/resistance, sets or repetitions. 

Let “fatigue” and “time to recover” be your guide on how much you should increase or decrease your dosage. Make sure to progress the number of sets gradually. 

Generally speaking, the peak number of sets and frequency of this routine would be 3-4 sets of each exercise, done 2-3x a week, spaced 2-3 days apart.

If starting from “zero” conditioning, and if the athlete were consistent with weekly frequency, it should take a minimum of 5 weeks to progress safely to this “peak” exercise volume. 

This should give those who are new to training an introductory approach to strengthening that is not only safe and effective, but will also dramatically improve both your performance and injury resilience on the pitch!

Depending on your experience with exercise, you may begin to notice a plateau with your progression, where you’re following all of the steps, but can’t seem to increase reps, sets, or load. This typically occurs after 1-2 years of training for beginners. A physical therapist will be able to provide instruction on how to continue progressing even when hitting these plateaus.

We look forward to diving deeper into the nuances of these topics with you in future videos.

If you’re interested in having you or your child evaluated and educated on the best exercise approaches specific to your needs and goals, please consider scheduling with one of our physical therapists. 

Our doctors are athletes themselves, which allows them to personally apply the scientific research in real-life high intensity scenarios, to best understand the scientific literature’s sports applications.

Our services are covered by health insurance, and can not only have a big impact on your performance on the field, but also in your lifelong health.