Due to the obvious variety of different ways in which it challenges your muscles and heart, soccer is an excellent activity for weight reduction.
Because it recruits both slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscle fibers, soccer is an excellent sport for increasing muscle mass and reducing body fat.
Playing soccer is an excellent cardio exercise because it forces you to alternate between utilizing your aerobic and anaerobic energy pathways, which results in a greater caloric expenditure than other types of workouts.
Soccer, in contrast to certain other aerobic exercises, helps you grow and maintain muscle mass, which in turn boosts your metabolism rather than promoting the loss of muscle.
Does Soccer Help You Lose Belly Fat?
Research has shown that playing soccer regularly may help reduce body fat. When you play soccer, you engage in activities that need explosive strength, such as sprinting, leaping, rapidly changing directions, and other explosive actions.
These activities activate the fast-twitch muscle fibers in your body. As fast-twitch fibers get their energy from glucose that has been stored, utilizing them causes the release of hormones that cause the body to continue to burn fat even after the exercise is over.
Because of this, you will burn more fat than you would if you worked your slow-twitch fibers by doing the aerobic activity at a consistent speed.
When you play soccer, you engage both your fast-twitch and your slow-twitch muscle fibers, and because engaging more muscle fibers encourages greater muscular development, playing soccer is an excellent way to increase your strength and size.
Soccer challenges your lower body in particular, including your glutes, hamstrings, quadriceps, and calves, which are all important muscle groups.
You engage all of your main muscle groups when you play soccer. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolism will be.
Therefore, if you effectively build up your huge muscle groups, you will be able to burn fatter even when you are not competing.
Does Soccer Make You Lose Weight?
When it comes to soccer and weight reduction, the statistics are what matter most, and those data indicate that a person who weighs 155 pounds only has to play a half-hour game of soccer to burn 260 calories. This is a significant amount of calories burned in such a short amount of time.
This indicates that if you want to shed 2 pounds of fat every month without making any other adjustments, all you need to do is play an hour-long game of soccer three times per week…but it’s not only the fat loss that makes soccer such a great technique to get rid of muffin tops; there are other benefits as well.
When you put on a pair of cleats, you’ll notice changes in other regions of your body that will make you glad you did so.
Those who are forced to fight the battle of the bulge daily need to do more than just avoid specific aisles at the grocery store to achieve their weight loss goals.
According to research, to win the war on weight reduction, a lifestyle change is required, and this shift must involve an overhaul of how we organize our whole day.
Those who are successful at soccer are aware of the fact that losing weight involves more effort than just having a nice run on the field.
There is also the ever-important matter of nutrition, in which food is utilized to feed the body, and some meals just supply a great deal more goodness in terms of their nutrient density than other foods do.
In addition to being an excellent immune system booster, food may also assist athletes in lowering their risk of inflammation and injury.
After including soccer and a healthy eating plan into your daily routine, one of the most crucial things you can do to initiate the fat-burning process is to make sure that you integrate other forms of exercise into your routine to develop muscular tone.
This is not only an essential part of growing stronger, but it also helps the metabolism function at a quicker pace, which in turn facilitates a more rapid reduction in body fat. Some resistance training exercise regimens, like planks and crunches, tend to go a long way toward building muscle tone.
Well, it’s is because these exercises work the muscles differently. The tone of your muscles is another factor that contributes to the overall look of your body.
Weight reduction on its own might cause the skin to become lax and wrinkled. The collagen fibrils in the tendons are favorably impacted by resistance training, which helps to strengthen the muscles.
This is another advantage of resistance training. Because of this, the risk of you sustaining an injury and needing to modify your normal fat-burning exercise is decreased.
Not only is it possible to lose weight by playing soccer, but individuals who have strong enthusiasm for the game will also find that it is an excellent method to get their heart rates up.
To get a leaner appearance, it is best to combine time spent exercising on the field with a nutritious diet, copious amounts of water, and other activities designed to tone the muscles.
Does Soccer Burn Calories?
A person who weighs 155 pounds may expect to burn around 260 calories in only 30 minutes of playing a soccer game. You need to expend more calories than you take in if you want to see weight loss results. To be more precise, to shed one pound of fat, you will need to burn 3,500 calories.
If you play soccer for an hour three times a week, you will be able to burn an additional 1,500 calories each week and lose 2 pounds each month just by playing soccer.
You get both an aerobic and anaerobic workout from playing soccer because the game needs you to consistently expend effort at varying degrees of intensity.
Increasing the frequency with which you move between employing these energy sources causes you to burn more calories.
In Conclusion
If you are not engaging in any extra forms of exercise, the key to successful weight reduction is to play soccer at least three times each week. However, to exercise all of your main muscle groups, you need to do two sessions of strength training per week.
This may help you avoid injuries and improve your performance when you’re playing soccer, and by gaining more muscle mass, you’ll be able to enhance your metabolism even more.
Always remember to warm up before your exercises and sports, and to cool down afterward. Always be sure to stretch out your muscles after you’ve worked them out to avoid getting tight and risking injury.