The exercise hierarchy for footballers

Most players do not have a programming problem. They have a priority problem. They are doing eleven exercises when four would have worked, and the four that matter are buried somewhere in the middle, done tired, after the ones that felt more interesting.

You have about forty five minutes, twice a week, on top of team training. That is the real constraint. Everything below is about spending it in the right order.

Rank one: the things you cannot replace

These are the movements nothing else covers. If a session gets cut short, these are what survives.

A knee-dominant push. Squat, split squat, step up. This is what a jump and a first stride are built on.

A hip-dominant pull. Romanian deadlift, hip thrust, Nordic curl. This is your hamstrings, and hamstrings are the most commonly injured muscle in the sport.

A single leg version of both. Football is played on one leg at a time. You sprint on one leg, you cut on one leg, you land on one leg. A player who is strong on two legs and weak on one has trained for a sport that is not this one.

Calf and Achilles work. Straight leg and bent knee. Almost nobody does it, and it is the tissue taking the most load every time you push off.

That is the list. Four things. Everything after this is an addition rather than a foundation.

Rank two: the things that make rank one useful

Explosive work. Jumps, bounds, throws, short sprints. Low volume, full recovery, stopping while every repetition still looks sharp. This is what teaches your body to use the force the heavy work built. Strength without it is a bigger engine in a car that never changes gear.

Trunk work that resists movement. Not sit ups. Your trunk's job in football is to stop your body folding when someone leans on you, and to transmit force from your legs into a shot or a header. That is what core work for a footballer actually means.

Upper body pulling and pushing. You hold people off with it, you win a shoulder to shoulder duel with it, and you land on it. Two exercises is enough.

Rank three: the things that are fine once the rest is done

Isolation work. Machines. Arm work. Anything that targets one muscle for its own sake.

None of this is bad. It is simply the last thing that should be cut from a session and the last thing that should be added to one. If your calves have never been trained and you are doing bicep curls, the order is wrong.

The order inside a session

Within a session the hierarchy is different again, and it is driven by fatigue rather than importance.

Fast work first, while your nervous system is fresh. Jumps and sprints are a quality exercise. Done tired they teach your body to be slow.

Heavy work second. Three to six repetitions, long rests, stopping with something in the tank.

Everything else last. Trunk, calves, isolation, the specific work you personally need.

Conditioning at the very end, or on a different day entirely.

What this looks like in practice

A session that follows the hierarchy is short and looks almost boring. Two jumps. Two heavy lifts, one push and one pull. A single leg variation. Calves. Something for the trunk. Done.

Six things, forty five minutes, and every one of them earns its place.

The player next to you doing fourteen exercises across ninety minutes is not training harder. They are spreading the same effort thinner, and the parts that would have changed their football are getting the leftovers.

Where people get this wrong

They train what they like. Everyone has favourite exercises, and they are rarely the ones they need.

They train what they see. Instagram rewards novelty. A Romanian deadlift is not novel. It is just the thing that keeps hamstrings attached.

They add before they subtract. A new exercise should replace something rather than sit on top of it. Otherwise the session grows until the important work is happening in the last ten minutes when there is nothing left.

If you want the full version of this written out as a programme, with the sets and the progressions, that is what the free strength guide is.