In no other sport do men run for so long, at such intensity, with so little rest, all while dribbling a slippery ball and fending off tacklers. No other team is as fit as the boys in red, white, and blue—could that help them do better than ever in South Africa? The World Cup is, for 95 percent of the globe, something like the Super Bowl, the Summer Olympics, and Mardi Gras rolled into one giant foot-stomping, hand-clapping, flag-waving fiesta.
For the better part of a month, this quadrennial tournament fuels parties and clears cubicles as fans of the 32 participant nations sing, dance, and get day-drunk in the name of national pride. We in the United States are late to the party. We were raised to dismiss soccer as some foreign trifle that encourages tie scores and rewards theatrical turf dives at a whisper of contact.
But a funny thing happened as the U.S. national team started to gain international respect. Last summer, it beat the world's number one squad, Spain, and has since risen to 16th in the world rankings. Heading into the Cup, in South Africa, the team has developed into a power that deserves to share the field with England, our first opponent this summer. (The date is June 12. Mark it down.) With success, more Americans began to pay attention. And they began to see soccer players at this level for what they are: arguably the best all-around athletes on the planet.
First consider the talent pool, says Pierre Barrieu, fitness coach for the U.S. men's national team. "In most countries, soccer is the number one sport. Imagine if all the athletes in the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and MLB played soccer. That's who we're competing against—the best of the best from around the world."
And then there's this: In no other sport do men run for so long, at such intensity, with so little rest, all the while being asked to excel at so many things: sprinting, jumping, cutting, tackling, and of course, dribbling a slippery, round ball with such skill that it seems to be tethered to their feet by a string.
"Soccer players are the world champions of intermittent exercise," says Peter Krustrup, Ph.D., an associate professor of exercise and sport sciences at the University of Copenhagen. "It's the combination of intense interval exercise with various activities requiring cardiovascular fitness and muscle strength. Elite soccer players have extraordinary intermittent exercise ability, high sprinting and jumping ability, and high endurance." They're strong, too: Norwegian research reveals that top soccer players can typically squat 440 pounds.
Krustrup says he and his colleagues have observed a 20 to 40 percent drop-off in performance between the first 15 minutes of a game and the final 15 minutes. "Soccer players become fatigued," he says, which means that often the fitter team wins. That's good news for the United States. Our national team may not be the world's most talented (that's Brazil, Argentina, or Spain), but you'd be hard-pressed to find any team in better shape, according to various trainers interviewed for this story.
On the following pages, take a closer look at four U.S. team members who will make us all proud to wear red, white, and blue this summer. Each personifies a component of fitness—agility, endurance, speed, and strength—that can be systematically improved. Use their strategies to work yourself into world-class shape. Just don't ask them for advice on how to dive. If you want to work on that, check with the Italians.
