In soccer when it comes to sprint speed as well as kicking power the hip flexor muscles play an important role in determining how fast you can run and how hard you can kick.
Your hip flexors are some of the longest and strongest muscles in your body yet they are essentially dormant in most athletes including soccer players, meaning, they are often ignored in most soccer speed training workouts, and likely have never been activated for speed or exercised properly for most athletic functions.
In a sense, your hip flexors, bridge your upper body to your lower body. You might also think of them as acting like a hinge between your core and your legs. They allow your thighs to be raised, moved forward and flex upon the pelvis . However, since these muscles are hidden deep within the midsection of your body, they usually go unnoticed and under trained.
If you have weak hip flexors that have not been properly developed, you will never perform at your highest level and will always feel like you are stuck in second gear. There is probably not a worse feeling to have as a soccer player than to feel slower than your opponent or not being able to make the play because you were just not quite fast enough. Even if you are already a fast runner or strong kicker, if your hip flexors have not been properly conditioned for speed you still have plenty of untapped potential to get even faster and stronger as a kicker.
Chances are, you have never even bothered to train your hip flexors; this is because there is no real good equipment in the gym to do so as well as there was probably never any importance placed on them in the first place.
There are two primary reasons why soccer players and other athletes struggle to get faster and are often disappointed in the results they get when trying to increase their sprint speed.
First, is that they are focusing their training on the muscles groups that will not have a big impact on their running speed, either because those muscles don’t play a huge role in the running process or because they are the same muscles that they have been training along but just using different training methods.
Second, The athlete’s speed training is usually focused on making the muscles stronger or developing greater endurance and not for conditioning muscles for faster contraction speed. Strength and endurance are important for success, however for speed you will need to condition muscles for fast contraction speed. When someone has a powerful kick, it’s often said that he has a ‘strong leg’, but more correctly it should be stated that he has a ‘fast leg’. Though strength does play a role, the best kickers and the fastest runners are those with the fastest, and not the strongest leg muscles. So get it out of your head that you need to have big muscles to be fast. Sure it would be nice, but it's not necessary.
This is why the training technique of using the resistance band with an isometric training strategy outperforms other soccer speed training techniques for developing faster athletes and quicker muscles. It has to do with how and where the force of the band is distributed back into your muscles. Your hip flexor muscles are absolutely loaded with fast twitch muscle fibers. These are the muscle fibers that help your muscles contract with speed. And because they are loaded with fast twitch fibers, they respond incredibly well to being trained using the resistance band with an isometric training strategy; and whenever you train your muscles this way, they always end up becoming quicker, as you will notice even when you are just finishing your workout, and not slower as you’ve probably noticed after other types of training workouts.
In addition to your muscles getting a more dynamic workout when forced to hold an isometric contraction using the band, so do the tendons that attach these fast twitch muscle fibers to the bone. You see your tendons are also like huge elastic rubber bands themselves and forcing them into an isometric contraction can make a huge difference in your speed and quickness. This makes isometric training with resistance bands a perfect match when training for speed.
Now when you perform the demonstrated exercise in the video for your hip flexor muscles, you are essentially going to flip on a switch for your athletic performance; you are going to be able to run faster, jump higher and kick farther after just a few days of this type of training.
To get the free exercise instructions and get all of the speed training videos in this series go to: SpeedTrainingSecrets.com
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