With the 2026 World Cup in full swing, people across the country will be tempted to dust off their boots. This is great news – the more people exercising, the better, in my eyes.
But if you plan to do this, there is one common footballing mistake worth avoiding, as I found out when Brooks Running invited me to spend a day training with Cambridge United FC.
Most recreational players tend to run a couple of ***** -for-leather 5Ks around their local town then declare themselves fit for duty. But that doesn’t do a very good job of preparing you for an actual game, explains Laurence Bloom, Cambridge United’s executive performance lead.
“A player covers roughly 10 to 12km per game,” he says. “If you do that distance once per week as a continuous, steady-state run, you’d probably think that was pretty comfortable and you could do it without too much muscle fatigue or soreness.”
However, a game of football is not a continuous effort. It is a matrix of sprints, accelerations, decelerations and changes of pace, all of which are far more demanding on the body than simply running 5km in the same direction.