Soccer coach says, "Cross country running ruins explosiveness"

That is simply not true, I won't get in to the science, but based on my own experience as an athlete and coach..."Cross country running ruins explosiveness" is a false. Running cross is certainly not going to improve explosiveness and there are probably other things a soccer player could be doing if they want to improve explosiveness...that's a fair statement.

In H.S., I was on a XC team with a 46x 400 and 10.4 100m sprinter, several basketball players and they were all pretty decent XC runners. Hopefully you are not on a XC team that focuses on just putting in tons of miles, but if soccer is your primary sport, during the XC season I would suggest putting emphases on your hill repeats and continuing to do some soccer drills on your own. At the end of a XC season your CV capscity will be greatly improved and your explosiveness will come back quickly. Probably the biggest lesson you will learn, which you will also hear from swimmers and bikers is the ability to handle and manage fatigue.

I ran the 880 and mile in high school.

On a couple of occasions I played in games with the soccer team, and ran circles around all of them.

The worlds most expensive soccer player, Gareth Bale, was a very good cross-country runner in his school years and claims that it gives him a massive edge over other players.

And he is about as explosive as it gets when it comes to soccer...

my best friend in high school decided to run xc as a junior and went on to drop 2 seconds from his 400 times that spring... he didn't like xc, but he did it again as a senior... he was also a pretty talented hurdler...

Distance running kills speed and explosiveness. There's no question about that. How many 100 meter guys do you see running cross country? And it's not because they couldn't be good at it. They will become slower. They will have less flexibility. Their upper body will also atrophy to some extent. It's really kind of a stupid question. Compare the body of a sprinter to that of a 10K guy. Do you think they were born that way? Do you really think genetics was 100% of the reason they look like that?

Fat Boy wrote:

Distance running kills speed and explosiveness. There's no question about that. How many 100 meter guys do you see running cross country? And it's not because they couldn't be good at it. They will become slower. They will have less flexibility. Their upper body will also atrophy to some extent. It's really kind of a stupid question. Compare the body of a sprinter to that of a 10K guy. Do you think they were born that way? Do you really think genetics was 100% of the reason they look like that?

What does that have to do with soccer?

There was a great article in Runner's World on line about what NCAA field sport coaches require their scholarship athletes to be able to do. They are expected to bust cross country runner times in the mile, half mile and 400 meters. They only get something like 30 seconds or a minute rest between each run and the times they are expected to hit are very tough. If they can't do it they have to take "running 101" every semester until they can. Guess what running 101 is. Pretty much cross country practice.

The article basically said, if their athletes didn't run cross country in high school they'd fail the test.

The interviews were with no one less than the Stanford Women's Soccer Coach (among many others). Stanford was the defending national champs in soccer when they did the article. It seemed that virtually every coach of every program had some version of this running endurance and fitness test.

So NCAA coaches don't seem to agree with these rec league and high school coaches. There's no science between what those amateur coaches say. It's stupidity and self-interest.

If you want to improve for something, train for it.

So if you want speed, train speed, and of course strength. No reason why you can't do XC as well. 1 sesion a week of strength, 1 of speed, a couple of XC.

Easy. Done.

JB Any wrote:

Not only would they lose explosiveness, but they would also lose agility.

Your argument for having them join the team on account of endurance is fairly weak. Soccer players have to do more than run in a straight line for 5k.

A 5K is not run in a straight line. Like marathons, they are run on an oval track.

It depends how you run cross country. The two most explosive animals on Earth do it cross country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr5Sru8gGSk

Good point. Ronaldo was utterly annihilated by a Spanish 200m club sprinter in a 40 m sprint test. If soccer is supposed to be so "explosive" and Ronaldo is the best player in the world then how on earth did that happen? Obviously soccer is heavily dependent on ball control and foot skills with a secondary importance on physical fitness attributes, namely a mix of endurance and speed, but not all out explosiveness.

I found the same at my school. Most of the guys were slackers while a few worked really hard. Then the team would ridicule them for getting injured when in actual fact the coach just didn't really help them in their training. I know that when in xc I never talked to the coach for training advice, no one trusted him, we would ask one of the hard-working guys.

What I found as a more serious problem of distance running impacting soccer skills, was distance running making my legs more fragile whilst playing soccer. I know it sounds strange, but all those little explosive movements are very taxing on the ankles, the knees, etc. and it seems that late in high school, after I first started taking up a moderate volume of distance running training, I felt much more vulnerable to injury whenever I'd play any amount of soccer. Of course, in my younger days, I had no knowledge about strength-training exercises, based on biomechanics (and provided by professional pTs), that play a huge role in durability for such tasks.

Cross country coach says "soccer playing ruins America".

Slopenguinrunner wrote:

Cross country coach says "soccer playing ruins America".

Agreed!

I agree with another coach who said, I hate soccer!

Correction:

You do not train to run slow for cross country. You train to run fast. You are not sprinting but you sure as hell aren't going slow. Also speed training is a large part of cross country because you need to be able to beat people on the last 400m. That is supposed to be an all out sprint. So yes, cross country runners need to be FAST. You also say your soccer team had better endurance than your cross country team. Does your soccer team run miles everyday? There should be no way that the soccer team had better endurance than your cross county team. If that is the case, you need some new coaches for cross country. ✌️

-your nigga Rasheed

I know this is a 6 year old thread but...

I rarely see soccer players really sprint or run for that matter. Today's game is about possession, not about out running or outlasting another team.

I always felt a well conditioned team could run down a poorly conditioned team and force mistakes and get breakaways late. But it's hard to get kids to really work hard and buy in to that. They'd rather do drills and things that don't hurt.

As for the soccer coaches... They don't want kids doing another sport for one reason: they might lose them to that sport.

First of all you are retarded because soccer is the most famous sport on earth, soccer players run the most out of any sport, and if you don't know anything just shut up.

I was a college soccer player at national level and also a semi-pro before college. I've been running for 3 years my times are not incredible I run 16:21 in the 5k, 2:42 in the marathon as December of 2015, last year I play rec soccer for a couple of months man my explosive power was gone, I was very fit I was able to run the entire game like crazy, but the change of gears and change of direction were nothing compared to when I used to just play soccer, they were pretty mucho gone although I was able to cruise the soccer field from side to side very easy without getting tired. You definitively lose power with distance running, you gain aerobic endurance but definitively you lose power and muscular volume.