Fitness With Football: Week 1
July 10, 2014
Fitness With Football: Week 1
I honestly don't know what I was thinking. 

It seemed like a really good idea at the time, to get fit after a summer of doing very little. The trouble is that I'd forgotten how much this sort of training takes it out of you.  

Before I go any further, let me explain what's happening.

Three times a week, myself and a couple of friends, will be running high intensity football drills on BerkoAstro near my home town.  The idea is to improve our fitness and our footballing ability, two things that I needed before the World Cup even began. We all play on Monday nights together so the four sessions of football, combined with three or four gym visits a week should do the world of good.

The sessions, in theory, should be more fun than just going to the gym and using a treadmill or going for a run because, as we all know, the only thing better than watching football is playing football. When you play football I find that I do a lot more cardio, push myself that little bit more, because there's an end goal to the process, going in search of that wonder-volley etc.

It was interesting to see on our first session just have addictive it is to play the game, especially when you've got 15 footballs and a big open area to have a knock about in. As soon as we'd finished pumping them up we couldn't get them away from our feet, except when one of us struck a wayward shot that we had to go and chase - that actually happened a lot. 

Because one of us (TOBY) couldn't be in attendance in these first couple of sessions, we decided to take it slow and just sort out a handful of the drills and give them a few test runs. Even with this, supposedly, more casual approach to the sessions we still got moving and ran ourselves into the ground. It became more and more apparent that both Jon and myself's estimations of our own fitness levels had been much higher than they actually are.

After just a few runs of the first two drills on the Tuesday and then three runs each of three drills the following day I can honestly say I was shattered and Wednesday night's sleep came pretty easily after the Argentina v Holland World Cup semi-final.

It's been a serious wakeup call and, although I was able to hit the goal in both sessions of getting at least 3000 fuel points - I hadn't been wearing the Fuel Band until I got to the sessions - it's just gone to show how much I really need this.  

There will be a little more reflection and review of the Fuel Band and its ability to motivate as we go through the weeks, and hopefully we'll improve (10 minute videos of us missing the target aren't going to be fun for anyone to watch) but at least we've broken ground on this plan.

Week 1, the casual week, is in the books.

We'll be back with week two when the intensity level is meant to go up......uh oh.

Posted by Oliver Wilson at 6:26 AM