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!

In this blog post we put some questions to West Ham nutritionist Matt Jones, asking him about how a player can correctly hydrate during football training sessions, and how this can be tailored to suit the weather, their on-field position, body composition and training routine.

Pro footballers are known for some strange pre-match habits – whether that’s being the last player to walk onto the pitch, cutting holes in the back of their socks, or kissing their goalkeeper’s bald head. 

Yet, one thing that every professional footballer does before, during and after football is hydrate properly. This is one habit that every Sunday league player should copy.

Good hydration is crucial. The average footballer is likely to lose 1.1 litres of water through sweat during a game; often more. Without replenishing yourself with enough fluid, you risk varying degrees of dehydration – when your body does not have enough water to do its job.

Existing evidence suggests that many footballers begin training and games in a hypohydrated state, and thus hydrating properly could provide a small competitive advantage over opposing players. Players may lose roughly 800 ml of fluid per hour through sweat when playing in cool temperatures and up to 1500 ml of fluid per hour when playing in warm temperatures. Some will only consume enough to replace 50% of that fluid, but many consume enough to prevent body mass losses of more than 2%.