Blue skies, international football, and an endless supply of those little flies that appear from nowhere… that’s right, summer is here!

With your Sunday league season over for another year, this is the ideal time to relax your body, allow your injuries to heal, and finally clean your football boots.

Yet, as long as summer holidays used to seem when you were a youngster, the new season isn’t as far away as you think. As strength, stamina and anaerobic fitness all decrease due to inactivity, it is in your best interest to maintain some level of fitness throughout the summer to avoid having to start from scratch come the new season.

Here are some tips to help you stay in shape while having an enjoyable summer!

Striking the ball too hard too often, trying to bring a high ball down out of the air, or too many tight direction changes — these are all common contributors to groin problems. With groin injuries, as with most, there are different types and severities, from minimal (grade 1) pulls to serious (grade 3) tears. 

Whilst you can’t eliminate the risk entirely the good news is that, again like with most types of injury, there are things that we can be doing to reduce the risk. Read our top five tips that you can implement into your routine to reduce your risk of a groin injury.

While football training for adults is a technical, tactical and physical challenge, for children just beginning their journey in the beautiful game, the focus is on fun.

Or, at least, it should be.

Grassroots football has become less popular these days, which may be down to the more competitive nature of the game, with many parents putting too much stress on their youngsters to become a future Fernandinho.

But as parents and coaches, it is our duty to strike the right balance between developing our children’s skills and making sure they have fun. So, it’s time to inject some FUN back into training!

Whether you are a youth coach or simply want to be a better footballing parent, here are some ideas on how to make football training fun for kids.

All of us have suffered an ankle roll – whether it was stepping down from the curb, landing from a height or getting caught out on a football field, it can be a chronic cause of instability – and more importantly, robbed game time! Therefore, doing all we can to try and protect against, if not prevent an ankle injury is of the utmost importance! Here we are going to outline some of the key considerations.

Hamstring tears can blight the careers of many players across the footballing pyramid, especially those that suffer more than one!

These 5 tips can help you reduce your risk of a hamstring injury, allowing you to increase your minutes, improve your performance and potentially prolong your footballing career.

While you may put your heart and soul into playing football, you are doing your potential a huge disservice if you don’t put as much thought into your nutrition.

Here are five reasons why nutrition should be something you care about as a footballer:

Soft tissue injuries such as muscle strains have unfortunately grown in prevalence in recent months, perhaps owing to fixture congestion and minimal recovery and preparation due to the COVID pandemic. Ankle and knee injuries are also common, and you can’t overlook the debilitating effects of the common cold.

Whilst there is no way to prevent all injuries in a contact sport such as football, below we cover five key points to help you reduce your risk of injury and improve your recovery process in the event that you are injured.

The art of football training is a broad topic that involves many aspects, although we can break it down into three main branches: Physical, Technical and Tactical.

All three overlap in many ways, but by understanding each of them more clearly, we can see what we need to work on to improve our individual game.

In this article we explore each of these training concepts in a little more depth, to give you a better understanding of what they encompass and how to make the most of them to develop your game.