Tag Archive for: Football

Craig Pickering

Final lessons from the World Cup: what the research says

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written extensively about some key performance aspects of the World Cup; how to prepare for performance in the heat and altitude, how to manage travel and time change, how to manage load, and how to handle the pressure of a penalty shootout. At this stage of the tournament, the teams that are doing well are undoubtedly going to be those that are getting these things right. But I’m not the only person who has been writing about the challenges of the World Cup – researchers have been busily publishing papers on the topic too. This article, the last in my World Cup series, pulls out the best of these, and tells us what we can learn from them—and how we might be able to apply these aspects to our own work with athletes.

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Craig Pickering

The long walk: preparing for the pressure of the World Cup

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Having looked at the influence of heat and altitude and travel and match demands at the 2026 World Cup, I’ll now turn my attention to the next topic in my World Cup preparation series: preparing for pressure.

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Craig Pickering

Playing to the limit: the science of fatigue and recovery at the World Cup

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Having looked at the influence of heat and altitude and travel on performance at the 2026 World Cup, and what can be done about it, I’ll now turn my attention to the next topic in my World Cup preparation series: fatigue and recovery.

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Craig Pickering

The away game: beating travel fatigue at the FIFA World Cup

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Having looked at the influence of heat and altitude on performance at the 2026 World Cup, and what can be done about it, I’ll now turn my attention to the next topic in my World Cup preparation series. This is something that affects many of us in today’s world: travel, jet lag, and travel fatigue. 

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Craig Pickering

The altitude problem: preparing for performance on the top of the world

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Preparing for the World Cup means preparing for some of the most unique demands in sport. In this multi-part series I’m breaking down each one in detail, starting with an article on preparing for heat and humidity that could influence performance at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. This article looks at another environmental factor: altitude.

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Craig Pickering

The heat is on: preparing for the temperatures at the 2026 FIFA World Cup

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Every four years, the men’s FIFA World Cup takes over the world of sport. Football (I can’t quite bring myself to call it soccer) is probably the closest thing we have to a genuinely universal sport, with cheap equipment, simple rules, the ability to play almost anywhere. It is culturally embedded across Europe, Africa, and South America, with growing popularity in the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, and North America. Football truly is a global sport, with an estimated 270 million people involved in organised versions of the game, and many more playing in parks and streets across the globe. 

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Martin Bingisser

GAINcast Episode 265: Creating better movers (with René Wormhoudt)

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Being a better mover solves a lot of problems: it makes it easier to pick up skills and adapt to new situations, which also helps reduce the risk of injury and increase the level of performance. Rather than focusing on your next injury prevention exercise, most athletes would be better off just becoming better overall movers. Dutch national football team coach René Wormhoudt joins this week’s GAINcast to discuss his training approach which builds upon this philosophy for both youth athletes and the world’s top athletes.

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Martin Bingisser

7 lessons on team speed

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Throughout October and November we posted a variety of content about team speed. With the chance to talk to so many experts on the topic, I’ve been thinking about it a lot myself as well. Below are some key lessons I’ve learned or reemphasized recently on getting athletes faster in team sports.

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Craig Pickering

Improving speed across football codes

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Sprinting is an important action in many sports. In soccer, for example, research has demonstrated that, whilst the total distance covered by a player in an English Premier League match has stayed reasonably consistent over time, the number of high intensity efforts has increased by 50%, with the total distance of high intensity running having increased by 30%. Studies from other sports classed as “football” (AFL, Rugby League and Union, American Football, Gaelic Football, etc.) demonstrate similar trends. As such, we can be confident that possessing high levels of sprint speed, and the ability to maintain this speed under fatigue, is an important aspect of success in these sports. The question for coaches, however, is how do we improve speed in our players?

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Martin Bingisser

HMMR Podcast Episode 259: Speed in context (with Jonas Dodoo)

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Sprinting on the track and sprinting on the field use the same blueprint. The key differences lie in how that blueprint is applied to a different context. On this week’s podcast speed coach Jonas Dodoo draws upon his experience helping elite players in nearly every sport get faster to explain the impact of the blueprint and the context on how you train speed.

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