7 TRAINING TIPS & TACTICAL INSIGHTS FOR THE PLAYERS OF TOMORROW PAUL FRENCH Copyright © 2016 Paul French All rights reserved. v1.2 For all the latest updates and discoveries, just Like the Facebook page, facebook.com/soccersuperpowers/ You can also follow me personally on Twitter: @pspfrench www.pspfrench.com TABLE OF CONTENTS The Performance-Enhancing Vegetable 5 From Baseball To Juninho Pernambucano: How To Make A Ball Wobble 7 The Carbohydrate Trap Revealed. Here’s The Golden Rule For Maximum Energy 9 The Difference Between Fitness and Freshness 13 The Surprisingly Simple & Powerful Thing For Improving Soccer Fitness (It’s Free) 15 How To Improve Pre-Match Sleep With This Simple Hack 17 The Soccer Stretching Myth Debunked (Introducing The Reverse Hamstring Release) 19 The Performance- Enhancing Vegetable The very latest research in sports drinks that improve athletic performance isn’t what you think. It’s not a lurid yellow isotonic formula with flashy marketing. It’s not a magic powder and it’s not chocolate milk, which you’ll no doubt already know is as good as it gets for post-match recovery (unless you’re lactose intolerant). We’re talking about a humble root vegetable. Most children I know grew up hating it, probably because it’s an uncommon colour and if cooked wrong, it tasted like mud. But researchers worldwide - and 2015-2016 Premier League Champions Leicester City - concur: when it comes to acquiring an aerobic edge, the beetroot is king. How much of an advantage does it give you? According to research from a professor at my alma mater, the University of Exeter in the UK, the right dosage of concentrated beetroot juice can give you a 3.5% gain in activity that lasts between five and 30 minutes. This isn’t a big number, but the ability to train regularly at 3.5% above your baseline is a game changer when compounded over time. And whichever position you play, you know the fine margins involved in getting a foot in front of your opponent. Professor Andrew Jones’ study, which was first published in 2011, attributes this to two things; that beetroot is high in nitrates and the effect it has on your mitochondria: In an interview given to Wired journalist Marc McClusky, Jones said: “It causes blood vessels to dilate, so you can provide more blood through them. Simultaneously, it seems to make the mitochondria more efficient, so they are able to create the same energy while consuming less oxygen. So you really have two things happening. Lower oxygen cost because the mitochondria are more efficient, and then you have a higher oxygen supply. In terms of performance, that’s a pretty good combination.” To take advantage of this combination, you’ll need the right dosage of beetroot juice. More does not equal more, folks. The consensus is that the optimal level is 600ml of juice consumed between 2 and 2.5 hours before training or playing. You can get this through normal juice from the grocery store, or more conveniently by bulk ordering concentrated powder sachets made by companies such as US-based Neogenesis Labs. This is much better if traveling to away games. But be warned! There are two serious drawbacks to drinking beet juice. The first, according to Cincinnati Bengals tight end C.J. Uzomah, who first tried the drink when playing for the Auburn Tigers in 2014, is that it tastes “like the worst thing in the entire world.” The second is that it turns your piss purple. From Baseball To Juninho Pernambucano: How To Make A Ball Wobble The knowledge of how to make a ball wobble in the air dates back more than a century, to 1908. There’s some debate about who the bulk of the credit should go to, but mainly it rests with Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Cicotte discovered that with the right grip he could eliminate the spin on the baseball. The result was the knuckleball, an erratic, impossible-to-hit pitch. Some 85 years later, a Brazilian footballer called Antônio Augusto Ribeiro Reis Jr. - Juninho Pernamubucano for short - applied the same physics to a soccer ball. Between 2001 and 2009, Pernambucano won seven consecutive championships with French Ligue 1 side Lyon. He notched 100 goals, 44 of which were direct from free kicks. The most famous of his free kicks came in the Champions League in 2003. Juninho hit a long range effort that bamboozled Bayern Munich’s Oliver Kahn – the world’s best keeper at the time – so much that he smashed his head on the post. Other players have since learned from the master, with the likes of Andrea Pirlo, Hakan Çalhanoğlu and Cristiano Ronaldo joining the fun. If you’re prepared to practice, you can too. In his book I Think Therefore I Play, Pirlo recounts how he practiced for weeks, sending balls flying over the fence at the Milanello training ground and annoying the kit man. His breakthrough came, as they sometimes do, while on the toilet. He rushed to the training ground, grabbed a ball and produced a “geometric gem.” Pirlo had realised that it was about how the ball was struck, not where: “In essence, the ball needs to be struck from underneath using your first three toes. You have to keep your foot as straight as possible and then relax it in one fell swoop. That way, the ball doesn’t spin in the air, but drops rapidly towards the goal. That’s when it starts to rotate.” You won’t get it first time. Or even on your hundredth. But if you follow these principles and be patient, one day you’ll crack it. • Place the ball with the valve facing towards you. • Adjust your run up according to your distance from goal, but never stand more than 5 meters from the ball. • Aim to hit the ball with your full side foot. Keep it locked. • Kick up the ball, from top to bottom. • Follow through quickly. The Carbohydrate Trap Revealed. Here’s The Golden Rule For Maximum Energy It’s hard to believe that nobody’s done this yet. Elite sports nutritionist Matt Lovell, who advises Premier League Champions Man City, knows how to put performance on a plate. In this chapter, I crystallise the carbohydrates advice he gives elite footballers into one rule that’s easy to remember. Using this will mean you’ll be fully charged every time you play AND never struggle with body fat. Knowing this puts you ahead of the competition. The problem with most advice about carbohydrate intake is that it’s written by the experts, not for the readers. What seems like logical advice for the expert is often missing crucial details or steps that make the advice actionable. That’s how you end up with not enough energy in the tank on match day or, worse still, struggling with body fat throughout the season. Generally speaking, footballers need to consume between two and five grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight. But there are two things to consider here… 1. How much training is the player doing? 2. How much does the player weigh? For example, in the 2013 Champions League, Cristiano Ronaldo, who weighs 80kg, ran an average of 9.9km a game. Chelsea’s Ramires, who weighs 73kg, covered an average of 11.4km a game. And Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who weighs 95kg, put in an average shift of 8.6km a game. Meanwhile, Messi (67kg), ran just 6.8km in the quarter-final defeat to Atlético Madrid (but otherwise averaged 8.2km per game). So it’s easy to see how complicated this can get for those who want to know exactly how much carbohydrate to eat. As Matt puts it: “There’s 500g of glycogen [glycogen is stored glucose, glucose is sugar formed by carbs] in the body; 100g in the liver and 400g in the muscles. If someone does 6 sets of 12 reps all over their body, which would take about 90 minutes, they’re only going to deplete glycogen by 30%. That’s 200g of carbs. A sports drink has about 50g of carbs. It’s easy to over-egg the bread.” So here’s the golden rule: If you’re training once a day, stick to 2g carbs per kilo you weigh. For example, a 70kg player should have a baseline daily carb intake of 140g. 70 x 2 = 140g They should then add more or less, depending on training requirements. So far, so good. But here’s the missing bit. What does 140g of carbohydrate look like? This may come as a surprise, but weighing out 140g of cooked white rice WILL NOT give you 140g of carbs. This is the bit that experts assume people know! As you’re aware, you can get carbs from lots of different places. Potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, asparagus. Yeah, asparagus. But to get 140g of carbohydrate by eating asparagus, you would need to eat nearly 6 kilos of the stuff. To get 140g carbs from white rice, you need to know that there is 80g of carbohydrate per 100g of white, long-grain, UNCOOKED rice. If you weighed out 140g of cooked white rice (which has only 28g of carbs per 100g), you would not be eating enough for your body weight. Because every gram of uncooked white rice contains 0.8g of carbohydrate, you need to do this sum first: 140 / 0.8 = 175g 175g. That’s what you need. Not 140g. Food weight does not equal carbohydrate weight.