Soccer coach says, "Cross country running ruins explosiveness"

Some kid running half-assed in cross country (25 miles a week) as long as they are actively in touch with their speed year round will never lose "explosiveness" racing 8-10 3 mile races for 3 months out of the year.

If anything that type of focus would make them a better soccer player.

Now if the kid trained like a serious runner and did 50- 70 miles a week for half the year with 10-13 mile regular long runs, yeah, they might lose half a step in sprint speed when they aren't recovered.

I've seen soccer players with limited running focus jump on cross country teams and run 17:00 for 5k in cross country and go out for track in the spring and run 52 and 1::59 for 800.

There is a balance for sure. Soccer requires a specific balance of endurance and quickness. Football reguires little endurance and explosive quickness.

A soccer player can do both without sacrificing soccer. And still be able to be able to help a cross team without depth.

If they trained like most of the high school coaches trained females in the 1980's, with endless 200 meter intervals and 3 mile recovery runs, they would be decent local runners and never lose any quickness for soccer.

Most people play soccer because they like it. Very few people who play actually have any explosive speed at all.

The same way many people love to run and yet fail to show much evidence of endurance, speed endurance or speed despite practicing it.

He's in it for himself, not the kids. That myth is all over the place, but it's simply not true.

By the way, where I coach, in Virginia, we have soccer in the Spring and Cross Country in the fall. For every area district when I look at the all-district and all-region soccer teams I recognize almost every name. Why? They all run cross country. This is also not at small schools, the schools around here play in our biggest classification in the state. While I'd say 25% of the soccer players in the area run cross country, I'd say 60% of the all-district players in soccer run cross country.

This is no scientific study, it's just anecdotal evidence, but the coaches at our schools that seem to win at every sport come close to requiring their kids to run cross country. There are four schools that always have over 100 running cross country and sometimes approach 200. When you talk to all but the very elite kids on these teams they are all doing it for soccer, tennis, baseball, basketball, wrestling, whatever. Maybe those coaches don't know what they're doing by encouraging their athletes to run cross country but those four schools kick everybody's butts in just about every sport.

Many soccer players can't hang the last 20 minutes of the game due to fitness, especially girls. They don't do the running training needed for soccer.

Cross country will get soccer players in great shape with six days a week of practices/meets better than two club practices and games.

However, I've seen many soccer players get converted to cross country/track runners and they don't pick up a ball again.

It's been 3 years since I started this thread and I was surprised to see it bumped again.

The girl in the original post ended up tearing her ACL during club soccer that year. She recently graduated and was an All-District player. After her injury, she put on a lot of weight and a little muscle, and went from being the quick/explosive player her coach wanted, to a much less active player, but much more physical. It worked for her in the end, but she was seriously injured on and off about 3 times during high school. In college she will probably play club ball as she did not get an athletic scholarship (which is another hugely false promise of club soccer coaches around here).

As for my program- the original post was in my first year as coach there. Since then (3 seasons ago), we have had a district runner up team and a district championship team for our girls. We also had a state runner up who went on to win states in multiple evens in track.

Now, we actually have a better XC team than either soccer team, and my boys' top 7 is made of 3 soccer players who are all in the 16:30-16:50 range. I'm still having trouble getting girl soccer players out for XC, but my #2 is a soccer player and she narrowly missed qualifying for our state championship last fall.

If I were a soccer coach, I'd say...by all means do distance running. But only 2x per week max. The rest of the time do anaerobic intervals and agility work. A full-bore XC schedule will wreck a soccer player's ability to perform.

You can build hecka stamina for late-game heroics doing 30-40 sec efforts. Just do them a lot, and do a lot of them. A 5mi run is a waste of time for a soccer player.

When I was in HS, our lacrosse team was No. 1 in the nation at the time. Our best attackman (all-state junior year) spent fall and winter doing XC and distance running. He SUCKED in the spring for lax season. Took him the whole season to get his legs back. Even slow doofus defensemen like me could smother him. Didn't get all-state as a senior and didn't get any D1 offers. Lesson learned.

So, your study of one was enough to convince you? Can you give any evidence that distance running was what hurt his performance? As everyone here says, correlation does not mean causation.

By the way, if he hadn't had any D1 offers prior to the spring of his senior year, he wasn't getting any in the first place. Their rosters are filled by then.

Take my word, pure distance running does not translate well into ANY other sport. Running is an individual island far from any coast.

It is invalid to argue that xc does not hurt explosiveness because many great runners have been soccer players. The soccer, arguably, provided them the speed and speed endurance to become great runners with training. But that doesn't mean that xc did not decrease their max speed. However, I'd think that any hs program that incorporates significant strides, hill sprints, and v02 max intervals (800-2k) or shorter stuff (150s, 200s, 400s, 600s) will improve speed over any soccer program. After all, you never see soccer players run 400s faster while on the soccer team than after running xc and track.

runningsucksa wrote:

Take my word, pure distance running does not translate well into ANY other sport. Running is an individual island far from any coast.

And very few, if any, XC programs only do pure distance running.

I had a similar discussion with my high schools coach about lacrosse. With 55 boys on the team its only the top kids that run a lot (40-50 mpw)but the lacrosse kids are afraid to lose muscle mass (per the strength coach). Even though the HS lacrosse coach would rather have kids that can run all day. The kids who don't like to run (my son) are just looking for a reason not to go out.

many soccer kids go on to be great xc runners, but how many great xc runners go on to be great soccer players?

xc runners are typically the ones who get kicked out of marching band because they cannot march and play an instrument simultaneously. xc runners in hs dont do much to prove otherwise.

i ran xc in hs ... and the guys on my team were the least athletic of any sport. most were slackers who didn't train over the summer ... except for the week before xc. most couldn't do 10 pushups to save their lives. i noticed the same thing at other schools. i was #1 on the team simply because i trained over the summer.

XC runners are slackers?

Funny stuff.

I do have a lot of kids that never thought of themselves as athletes come out for XC, then start running 60+ miles a week and bingo, they become athletes.

Speaking of soccer, so many teams/clubs have 2 mile time trials as part of the process of picking players. Seems like soccer coaches think the kids need some endurance.

What this really means is that you are far more likely to find kids who are incredibly unathletic in your HS XC team, but that is because all they want to do is be on a school team. Those are the same kids who make up the back 30% of the pack in your XC meets or the benchwarmers in any other walk on sport.

I can say this right now, anyone who is finishing within the top 5-10% of ANY XC meet is athletic enough to be doing at least another sport in HS.

Here is the trick - near daily striders and/or speed work (200s-400s with ADEQUATE INTERVALS). The other major trick for them to use is tempo running very well- this is what gels your speed and your endurance together in the form of stamina - ability to endure 90 minute games at the pace of the level they are playing at.

I was an XC-only carthorse- no speed at all on the track. Guess what...I also liked soccer and was considered very 'quick'. Why? I think it was because I could turn and accelerate from zero to some fairly decent pace faster that kids whose top speed was much faster than me. But in soccer pure speed is not that useful like it is in, say, football.

Likewise, 'explosive' speed is not really essential for soccer. Its all about skill, 'quickness'(see above) and good old XC endurance. Your coach is wrong.

I am afraid to say this is true. Training people to run slower will in fact make them slower runners. Their endurance may improve considerably, but outright speed will be the cost, and this speed is almost certainly more important. If the players are already quite slow, then cross-country may be useful to increase endurance, but physical training should focus on explosive speed and strength, with endurance training kept at a level that wont affect development of the other two attributes.

I am afraid to say this is true. Training people to run slower will in fact make them slower runners. Their endurance may improve considerably, but outright speed will be the cost, and this speed is almost certainly more important. If the players are already quite slow, then cross-country may be useful to increase endurance, but physical training should focus on explosive speed and strength, with endurance training kept at a level that wont affect development of the other two attributes.

Dylan wrote:

I am afraid to say this is true. Training people to run slower will in fact make them slower runners. Their endurance may improve considerably, but outright speed will be the cost, and this speed is almost certainly more important. If the players are already quite slow, then cross-country may be useful to increase endurance, but physical training should focus on explosive speed and strength, with endurance training kept at a level that wont affect development of the other two attributes.

To address your point, A) it is not true, B) Tell Clyde Hart running at slower paces is bad for sprinters (hint, he coached a former 200m WR holder), C) you can train multiple aspects of fitness at a time, it doesn't have to be black and white.

I wrote an blog post several months ago about this. Take a look.