Should Footballers Jog?
In football, players are pretty much constantly running for 90 minutes, occasionally walking when the ball is out of play, but mainly jogging. Because players are constantly on the move and jog a lot, and football only has one stoppage at half time, it would make sense that footballers need to have good aerobic fitness. To get aerobic fitness, players would have to jog often and for long-distance. However, while footballers do need some aerobic fitness, jogging and long-distance running is not an effective method of training. In fact, footballers should not go jogging at all. Long-distance running and footballers jogging can actually be harmful for performance in matches and have a diminishing effect on their match fitness.
Why Jogging Negatively Affects Footballers
Well, football is a sport that favours powerful and quick movements. You can see this when you think about the best players in the world, and what makes them so special. Lionel Messi’s lightening quick movements and turns, Cristiano Ronaldo’s powerful leap, Kylian Mbappe’s explosive bursts of speed. Football is a ‘power-sport’, which requires great strength. The truth is, jogging doesn’t get these results. They can often get the opposite. Jogging actually can make footballers weaker and slower. This is because there are fibres within muscles, some of which are ‘slow twitch fibres’ and some ‘fast twitch fibres’.
Footballers, along with other elite athletes who perform high intensity, explosive movements like sprinters, high jumpers, and tennis players are blessed with a high proportion of fast twitch muscle fibres. They allow these fast and powerful movements that are so important in the sport. So, footballers jogging or running long distances actually stimulates the slow twitch muscle fibres, so they are working those fibres and ignoring the fast twitch fibres. As a result, their bodies and muscles adapt to these slow movements and they become used to it, meaning their slow twitch fibres overpower their fast twitch fibres.