The recent, widely televised World Cup has created many new soccer fans in the U.S., but not necessarily for the deft ball control, precise playmaking and flurries of yellow cards.
With lust or envy, many Americans registered the physiques of the men on the pitch.
Pound for pound, professional soccer players are among the fittest team athletes in the world. In the course of a 90-minute game, they will cover as much as 6 miles, depending on the position they play. They spend 70 percent to 80 percent of the time running, often at a full sprint, while jumping, spinning, pivoting and kicking with pinpoint accuracy.
But there’s another, aesthetic component. Elite soccer players have tough, toned bodies that are buff yet less extreme than, say, football players and many other athletes.
“A distance runner has lean legs but doesn’t have a lot of upper body strength, while a sprinter has huge legs,” said Michael Bergeron, an applied physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
“Now you take a blend of both, which the soccer player has,” he said, throw in some ripped abdominals “and you have a lower body that looks pretty good.”
How does one get a body that looks like that?
The best way, of course, is to actually play soccer. That’s how the pros, such as the Chicago Fire, do it.
“The way you get to be a good soccer player is by playing a lot of soccer,” said Dr. Margot Putukian, director of athletic medicine for Princeton University.
Play the game often, and the body–to some extent–will follow.
Soccer has been elevated to a near-religion in parts of Europe and Latin America, but it also is widely popular in the U.S. Last year, an estimated 17 million Americans played soccer at least once, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, making soccer the third-most popular team sport in America, behind basketball and volleyball.
There are good reasons soccer players have the physiques they do.
In broad terms, the pace of a soccer game is roughly equivalent to interval training–periods of high-intensity exercise followed by periods of low-intensity exercise, said sports physiologist Mike Bracko, a spokesman for the American College of Sports Medicine in Indianapolis.
The elite player must have excellent core strength because of all the jumping and heading in the game.
“When you strike a ball with your head, most of the power comes from the core,” said Putukian, a former player and devout fan, talking by phone recently while watching World Cup action on TV. This, she said, “is why they have the abdominal musculature that you see.”
Because the game requires nimble footwork and explosive speed mixed with extreme endurance, the soccer player must be lean enough to run fast and sturdy enough to last the entire game. That’s pretty much non-negotiable, with the occasional exception of the skinny player who happens to be so strong he’s able to go the distance.
“You don’t see any William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perrys in soccer,” said Bruce Morgan, head athletic trainer for Houston Dynamo, formerly the San Jose Earthquakes.
Which brings us to Ronaldo. When Brazil’s 6-foot star striker–who broke the all-time record for cumulative World Cup goals in the recent tournament–topped 189 pounds while recovering from an injury, newspapers from Beijing to Berlin to Rio to Bombay weighed in. Nevermind that he was thin by American football standards, Ronaldo even heard about it from Brazil’s president, who somewhat indelicately asked the national team’s coach: “Is he fat or not?”
The remark elevated Ronaldo’s extra kilos to a national emergency.
The next day the president apologized.
‘They just seem sexier’
Sadly, capturing the soccer player’s broad appeal may take more than a proportioned body and toned physique. Some say part of it boils down to something simpler: skimpy uniforms and good hair.
“It doesn’t surprise me that women might think that soccer players are hunky,” said Mike Bracko, a spokesman for the American College of Sports Medicine in Indianapolis. “Soccer players wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts, and you can see their legs and arms and face.”
“Soccer players also are a little more flamboyant,” Bracko said. “They either have a shaved head, or they do a David Beckham (above) kind of hairdo. Maybe it’s the European influence. They just seem sexier.” [L.A. TIMES].
