Football: the role of functional training in pre-season preparation

As much as in the media summer football enters a kind of parallel dimension dominated by market negotiations and social networks, in reality the insiders already take the field in July for what can be considered a fundamental phase in the construction of the entire season: pre-season preparation.

At both professional and amateur levels, this phase is in fact proving to be decisive in creating the athletic conditions necessary to sustain the frenetic pace of modern football, which can produce both positive and negative repercussions (depending on the quality with which it is approached) even months later, and thus in the middle of the sporting season. If one considers that in fact an international footballer can get through 60-70 matches per season between championship, national cup, continental competition and national selection, one can realise the importance of the athletic approach to the preparation phase in order to avoid physical complications in the course of the sporting year.

From the famous 'Zeman steps' to the present day, pre-season training in football has undergone numerous changes over the decades, adapting to the transformations undergone by the game itself. Functional training, however, is carving out an increasingly indispensable role for itself within these dynamics, acting as a kind of link between the development of conditional strength and technical gestures. A complete functional training cannot in fact disregard a phase of analysis of the athletic and technical performance required in the discipline in question, so as to be able to identify the main specific motor schemes and intervene accordingly. Movement in this sense is in fact the unit of measurement adopted by our body to achieve a goal, and it is on this that we must therefore work, rather than on the single muscular contraction.

Fundamental to strength-building exercises, however, is a solid base of joint mobility, which, together with an initial approach to the various specific functional training tools and core training, predominantly characterises the preparatory phase of the season.

Mobility, stability and co-ordination are in fact fundamental elements in maximising an athlete's performance capabilities and for this reason tools such as Flying Suspension Training [LINK].the Flowbag [LINK].Med Ball [LINK]. or kettlebells [LINK]. can lay the foundations for the subsequent construction of more advanced functional training, which will characterise the competitive phase of the season to a greater extent.

The pre-season preparation from a functional point of view, especially in its very first stages, must therefore be accompanied by an important Joint Mobility work, in order to increase elasticity and coordination, enabling a full awareness (and therefore control) of one's body by the athlete. Working with heavy loads on inadequate postures can be not only ineffective but also counterproductive and damaging, which is why the first training sessions must serve precisely to assess and correct this type of criticality in players.

Specifically, Primitive Functional Movement sessions [LINK].Especially during pre-season preparation, they can be very useful for working on the joint mobility, global joint stability and co-ordination of the players, enabling them to be fully receptive during the subsequent training phases, in which workloads of progressively increasing intensity are administered.

This approach, coupled with functional strength work and individual and tactical technique specific to the coach's schemes, is essential not only to arrive at the start of the championship in optimal condition, but also to be able to sustain the frenzied pace of modern football throughout the season, ensuring high performance on the pitch and averting the nightmare of musculoskeletal injuries from indirect trauma and stress/overloading.

Below are examples of the development of the football-specific functional training system, Soccer Functional Training [LINK].which examine the various coordination and conditioning skills in training circuits that start from the basis of Articular Mobility and lead to development in role-specific movements on the field.