HOW SLIDE BOARD EXERCISE BENEFITS SOCCER PLAYERS

With Spring sports seasons quickly approaching, many soccer players are picking up the pace on their training and preparations. It’s important that throughout training, players are not only strengthening and conditioning their bodies for the field, but also protecting their muscles and joints from impact and injuries. Training with an UltraSlide can help soccer players to prevent injuries, improve their balance and coordination, and to strengthen their groin and hip muscles. (To view our blog post that specifically addresses slideboard benefits for goalies, click here.)

How Slide Board Exercise Benefits Soccer Players

• Prevent Injuries: Using slide boards builds the muscles and tendons surrounding joint structures to help them withstand impact or strain.
• Balance and Coordination: Slide board exercise strengthens the stabilizer muscles that support dominant muscle groups, improving balance and coordination.
• Strengthen Groin and Hip Muscles: Using a slide board engages and conditions the muscles that help to prevent injury to the groin and hip muscles.

Prevent Injuries

Exercising with an UltraSlide is a great way to prevent injuries and keep your body from experiencing unnecessary traumas. Slide board exercise helps to strengthen the muscles and tendons surrounding important joint structures in the hips, knees, and feet that aren’t frequently exercised, helping them to withstand impact or strain. For example, lateral exercises on a slide board help to build the outer hip muscles as well as those in the inner and outer thighs, which stabilize the knees and can minimize joint pain and injury.

Balance and Coordination

Many moves and frequently performed exercises in soccer call upon the same dominant muscles repeatedly and regularly place stress on those same muscle groups. Neglecting the stabilizer muscles can lead to imbalance, and in worst-case scenarios, injury or degeneration. Lateral exercise helps soccer players to work the stabilizer muscles, allowing athletes to enjoy more balanced and coordinated movement on the field as well as lateral strength and flexibility.

Strengthen Groin and Hip Muscles

Some of the most frequently experienced pain and injuries that soccer players endure happen in the groin and hips. This is often due to weak core muscles, greater hip abductor to adductor strength ratios, and a lack of training in the off season. Training with slide boards can significantly reduce the likelihood of injury to these areas. Slide boards are an ideal tool to use for core strengthening exercises as well as full body workouts. Using slide boards to exercise can engage all of the muscles supporting the hip joints, helping to even out the abductor to adductor levels of strength. An UltraSlide can also be used year-round, making it a great option for training between seasons.

As spring soccer seasons approach, make sure you are ready for the field by training with an UltraSlide slide board. Preventing injuries, improving balance and coordination, and strengthening groin and hip muscles will help to get your body is in the best shape possible to safely dive into training.

UltraSlide slide boards have benefited teams, athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and rehabilitation patients worldwide for more than 25 years. Relied upon by professional and collegiate strength and conditioning coaches, sports medicine professionals, leaders in fitness, personal trainers, and home fitness enthusiasts, UltraSlide slide boards provide fun and challenging lower-body workouts and are highly effective functional training tools.