soccer research

Have you searched pubmed or sports discus? These will help you in your quest for the info.

There is a lot of debate in soccer in that what energy systems are dominant - if any and what to train. On other forum sites I have been on, there is many conficting views on the area.

Soccer is not an area I have much experience with but I personally believe it is not as aerobically dominant as some experts say

I play a lot of football (soccer) and I would say that it depends on the fitness and level the individual is playing at.

With high fitness there will be more aerobic work.

Football (soccer) is generally an endurance sport with lots of explosive (possibly anaerobic) work. Due to this, I think it does depend on the fitness level of the individual.

Also, the level at which the player plays will depend on the amount of work done. For example, if you are playing at a high level, eg - professional, then the team will work together well as a unit and the work rate will be lower. However, the pace of the game will be higher and the explosive work more demanding. Playing at a lower level, eg sunday league, teams tend to be less well organised and you can find you are out of position a lot more and therefore working hard to compensate for a teammate. Coversely, the pace of the game will be much slower, but the fitness levels of the players will also be lower.

Hope this helps.

Having spent a lot of time involved with the sport I catagorically believe as many experts do that it is primarily aerobic. The damage that would occur to an athlete if they were to stay in an anaerobic state for that period of time would be considerable. In saying that, many athletes do, and yes they do pay the price with recurrent injuries and shortened career spans.

You need to remember that you can train the body to perform the same task in a primary aerobic mode with training, and if you had the option of spending 90mins with a heart rate consistently up above 160 bpm or below 150bpm, you would surely take the later if there was no/minimal performance difference. (yes it is possible to achieve this)

Given that players may travel well into the tens of Kms during a game, much of which is jogging, you would notice the average player completing this anaerobically would firstly be fatiguing by the end of the match and secondly be struggling to recover from it.

The back side of this type of training would be that the ability to sprint may decrease. For this reason, the goal would be to build the aerobic capacity before the season proper starts and then maintain it through the season while increasing sprinting ability through a moderate amount of anaerobic training.