At least for soccer players, it comes down to a blend of two types of fitness - your base endurance, which comes from longer distance running, and your speed, which comes from sprint-based workouts.
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To combat the monotony of gym workouts, I started playing soccer. I looked at workouts as training sessions. My soccer training includes squats, pushups, resistance-band work, and sprints. Ninety minutes of running became part of my love of the game rather than a chore.
Fitness has always been one of my strengths. I can do all the long-distance runs. When I was at school and we entered the competitions, I used to do the 100m, 200m, and the 1500m as well, so it's never just been a pace thing.
As an athlete, there are advantages being with a team and getting regular physio.
As professional soccer players, we take our bodies to the extreme. We're the people at the gym that look like we're breaking the machines. Pushing our bodies to the limits is what makes us so strong and capable and Olympians. It's not an easy thing to consistently do over and over again to your body.
Athletics keeps us healthy, gets us up and running around. It also gives you an opportunity to meet a lot of different people, which is very important.
In international football, you need pace and you need your players up top to create things out of nothing and run at people.
People assume that you need to run fast to get to optimum fitness, but the truth is endurance lifting makes you stronger and leaner.
I think what endurance sports teach you is to stay dedicated, stay focused, and also to understand you're going to have ups and downs, but you need to keep running right through them.
I'm a runner from sports. I've been a runner, but I wasn't a cross-country runner or anything like that. I played a lot of soccer growing up.
If you want to be a successful runner, you have to consider everything. It's no good just thinking about endurance and not to develop fine speed.
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