Training during the winter break: A must for successful soccer teams

"The foundation for success in the second half of the season is laid in the winter" - what seems like a hackneyed coach's slogan for increasing motivation during the winter break is 100 percent correct from a sports science perspective. 

Training during the cold winter months is so important that people now talk about the "golden phase of the season". Because it is exactly here and now that the foundations are laid for the complete next soccer year 2022.

In this blog post, we will show you why, when and how you should train so that your 2023 soccer year can also become the most successful year in the club's history.

The year 2022 was exhausting - physically, but above all mentally. Several English weeks, match cancellations due to the pandemic and minor to major aches and pains. We recommend that you first of all enjoy the winter break - without any motivation to perform. To get physically and mentally fit and ready to perform again.

After that, however, you should start to work on your best form for the next year. 

Only in this phase of the season can we work with you 100% on your ambitions. Whether it's to stay in the league, win the championship or win the derby against your local rival - during the winter break, there's no need to worry about postponing matches or players who are behind in their training. You, your athleticism and its constant improvement are the focus. 

Your game. Your decision.

With our B42 trainer and training solution, we want to make sure that you don't belong to those teams that at some point have to realize that they didn't do everything they could to achieve their individual goals during the winter.

There are therefore good sports science reasons for a timely training comeback during the winter break - the so-called residual effects.

These state that even after a short period of inactivity, a complete break has a negative effect on your metabolism and, in the long term, on your physical resilience.

After a break of about 10 days, you lose about 5 to 10 percent of your endurance capacity.

As a rough guideline for this loss, it can also be extrapolated that a 30-day break results in a rough guideline value of 15-30 percent.

So as soon as you completely abstain from sporting activity - i.e. from muscular load stimuli - your body is signaled that the existing musculature is "no longer needed".

After another ten days, you will not only have lost 10 to 20 percent of your endurance capacity, but your strength values will also gradually decrease.

Although these vary from athlete to athlete, on average they are only around 70 percent of their initial level after one month.

In addition to the listed impairments, there are other measurable deteriorations in performance as well as changes in your hormonal balance.

So don't be one of those teams that realizes after Christmas that preparation is about to begin.

By then you will have firstly already lost fitness and secondly too little time during the preparation period to get back to the previous performance level.

Strength, stamina, agility and speed are the ultimate prerequisites for sustainable success in today's soccer. From amateur to professional - without these physical skills, not much is possible in a progressive implementation of soccer with high pressing, fast switching play or overlapping sides of the field.

The perfect soccer player must therefore not only be able to "work hard" for 90 minutes. He must also be bursting with power and dynamism in one-on-one battles, rip off serial sprints like a Duracell bunny, and at the same time slink across the pitch with the elegance of a feline predator.

Soccer is a complex sport - and training is just as tricky. 

But what exactly are your personal strengths and weaknesses? Where are you better or worse than other soccer players or teams? What do you need to work on specifically? With our wide range of training options, we offer one or more training options for every physical performance segment - and with our performance tests, you know right away what you need to work on.

What has been an absolute standard in professional soccer for some time now, checking your fitness by means of performance diagnostics and also creating training plans and individual units on the basis of these values, is also possible with our app. For the areas of speed, endurance, strength and agility, we have collected the know-how from the professional field, adapted it and now made it available to you.

After completing the tests, B42 athletes receive their own PlayerCard with a personal B42 score, which is also calculated for the individual areas. Furthermore, you can see at a glance how you performed in comparison to your age group, club or position.

One thing is as certain in this country as the coach saying "ref, my players have to work again tomorrow": Whenever winter takes a particularly tight stranglehold on us in this country, many teams start their preparation period with long endurance runs. 

Is it a mistake to jog across the asphalt tracks of your hometown in squeaky-yellow neon vests and flickering headlamps? Yes and no, but let's start with a structured approach...

To emphasize this clearly: Basic endurance is important - in principle, it is an important foundation for all sports. Even weightlifters need it.

Because if it is well trained, it primarily causes an increase in physical performance and thus also optimizes the recovery ability.

This can also lead to improved injury prevention. Players with well-developed basic endurance also tire more slowly, which can help prevent technical and tactical errors.

This should clarify that every athlete - including soccer players - should have a well-developed basic endurance.

If you take a closer look at the requirements profile of soccer players - regardless of whether they play in the district or national league - one thing is quite obvious: 

While ball contact times are now shrinking into the sub-second range, running performance and, above all, so-called "hard runs" (i.e. maximum sprints) seem to be exploding from game to game.

And that's exactly what you should be training for. In winter training, you have to do justice to the complexity of the sport of soccer.

For the soccer player, this means:

Tempo and direction changes must be included. Movements that probably occur rather rarely in a typical jogging round in winter.

In addition to the endurance programs, our strength, flexibility and stability units were also designed from our experience in training with Bundesliga professionals and thus tailored to the needs of soccer players. 

One way of preparing soccer players for the "faster" game is the HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) approach.

HIIT alternates intense workouts with active breaks. This means, for example, sprints or jumps as an intense load followed by an active break. There are no rigid rules about how long the intervals have to be.

The exercises push the body to its limits, so that it needs an above-average amount of oxygen and thus stimulates the metabolism, which consequently also significantly improves endurance. During a high-intensity interval unit, the body also burns more body fat than as a result of a "normal" running unit through the half-dark alleys of the hometown.

That's why it's not surprising that the feedback from previous users of the app accessing the workout has been overwhelmingly positive.

"Since the GAMECHANGER, I get significantly more air and was thus able to improve my running time by 30 seconds per km! Is certainly also in the combination of training and the breathing exercises, but my biggest problem before was actually the oxygen intake. So really a brutal contribution, thanks for that!" ~ Florian Rädler, Kirchheimer SC (Landesliga Südost)