Following a strict diet will help you achieve your best form if you exercise well. I’m not saying that training as a football player will make you look like Cristiano Ronaldo, but it will help you get into the best shape of your life. Training like a soccer player will help you lose weight while building strong leg and core muscles with interval training and high-volume lower-body sit-ups with core work.
While interval training necessarily involves the legs, football players need powerful legs to run faster, keep defenders at bay, and hit the ball harder. Core stability and strength play an important role in athletic agility, so football players can attribute some of their skills to core strengthening, which they do several times a week. Football players train in a specific way to prepare their bodies for the game, and it shows in their physique. Thus, football players must train both of these systems, and they manage to do this with the help of interval training.
Football players do not follow the same training plan: each player trains differently depending on their position and style of play. Some players have different approaches to game/training days and rest days, as the rest day requires less energy to reduce their calorie intake. For those athletes who prefer to eat more healthy fats and fewer carbs, their pre-match plan may be slightly different from that of an athlete who relies on carbs for fuel.
The ideal diet for soccer players require that 55 to 60% of their daily calorie intake come from carbohydrates, 15% from proteins, and 30% from fats. Leslie Bonci found that the typical footballer’s diet contains 43% carbohydrates, 40% fat, and 17% protein. I translate these numbers to soccer players because each meal should have two-thirds of carbohydrates and one-third of proteins, emphasising moderate amounts of fat. Carbohydrates and fats are the fuel that provides the player with the energy needed for training and matches. The relative contribution of these fuels during training will depend on several factors, including pre-exercise carbohydrate stores, exercise intensity and duration, and the player’s training status.
Athletes like soccer players need to be aware of nutrition, exercise, weight gain and loss, and a host of other elements. Whereas professional football players could walk off the field and scoff at steak and chips in the past, there is now more focus on nutrition and its impact on players’ performance. There are a few footballer diet secrets we can all learn, whether you’re running around the field for 90 minutes or doing a high-intensity workout at the gym.