No Time For Goalkeeper Training? Interval Training Can Pay In Spades!

You have no time to train huh? Excuses run rampant when we are short on time, but then again who isn’t running against the clock these days. We live in a society where work comes first…play comes second. Isn’t that a sad state of mind? So what if we played reverse psychology for moment and made your play time first up on your daily "to-do" list. The benefit of increasing your fitness will pay off in spades if you can use a little bit of time management and and get your training out of the way first thing in the morning? "Oh, but it takes too long to train, and I have to go to work on time, and…etc…yawn". Rise and shine lady’s and lads, let me show you why interval training is the shortest and sweetest way to a lean, mean goalkeeper machine!

A new study in the Journal of Physiology showed that short bursts of intense training can produce the same results as traditional endurance training, and it only takes minutes. "Yeah but I heard all this stuff at 2 AM on an ab-buster infomercial". Listen to what the lab-rats have to say:

"The new study was conducted on 16 college-aged students who performed six training sessions over two weeks. Eight subjects performed between four and six 30-second bursts of "all out" cycling separated by 4 minutes of recovery during each training session. The other eight subjects performed 90-120 minutes of continuous moderate-intensity cycling each day. Total training time commitment including recovery was 2.5 hours in the sprint group, whereas the endurance group performed 10.5 hours of total exercise over two weeks. Despite the marked difference in training volume, both groups showed similar improvements in exercise performance and muscle parameters associated with fatigue resistance."

The above can be extended to many forms of exercise, even your goalkeeping training. I have always been a strong advocate for goalkeepers to train short and sharp. Remember the law of specificity? You can’t even spell it right? Well specificity means (very broadly and loosely) that we must aim at looking at specific exercises for specific sports to maximize performance. Goalkeeper’s don’t run miles per match. The nature of goalkeeping is short, intense bursts of speed, agility and strength, followed by periods of rest. Therefore, plan your goalkeeping sessions with interval training in mind. Interval exercises are short and intense, they don’t take long, and you can get the same benefit out of a few minutes of training as you would doing long endurance type exercise.