Pre-Season Considerations for Football Players

If you love playing football, you’ll know the importance of pre-season. Get preparation right at this time, and you can set yourself up for success:

• You can be fitter, stronger, and leaner as competition kicks on.
• You can have background variables sorted, with nutrition habits dialled in and your supplement regime sorted.
• You can start the season feeling healthy, confident and optimistic.

The opposite is also true. If pre-season preparation is poor, you can find yourself  experiencing issues from the very start of the season:

• You might find that niggling chronic injuries from the previous season have not fully healed, and your body does not feel up for the rigours of gameplay early in the season.
• You might feel like you carry too much weight after the holidays, and feeling heavier can hold you back in more ways than one.
• You might feel on the back foot in your diet, with a plan of action to fuel performance.

In this post, I want to help you prepare well and get the most from pre-season.  There are several considerations to think about, and each will stack up in your favour for a better season:

1. Recent lifestyle
2. Fitness levels
3. Nutritional needs
4. Dietary supplementation
5. Health status
6. Recovery needs

While you don’t have to change all of them to be successful, you can become aware of them to help build momentum and start your season strong

In my work supporting professional footballers at different European clubs, I have found that players are addressing these same factors. Knowing this gives you peace of mind that you are thinking along the right lines when it comes to your pre-season prep.

Pre-Season Consideration 1: Recent lifestyle

At first glance, you might wonder what recent lifestyle factors have to do with pre-season training, but it’s a vital theme to think about. For example, if you have been on summer holidays with friends and family, you might have consumed more food and drink than usual. As a result, you could be carrying more body fat that normal and out of your typical dietary habits.

This slight fat gain is common and almost inevitable—even in the pro game. When players return for pre-season, they will often be holding onto more fat because the training intensity has dropped, adherence to diet goes down, and they may have been on holiday too (Milanese, Cavedon et al. 2015, McEwan, Drobnic et al. 2020). Footballers are human after all, however a critical point here is that being lean matters a great deal in football. Research shows that body fat levels are inversely related to aerobic capacity, power-to-weight ratio, and thermoregulation (Gabbett 2005). In other words, the leaner you are, the more efficient you get to be on the pitch.

For this reason, top professional players often have their body fat percentage checked weekly by one of their nutrition or medical staff to ensure they are staying lean enough to perform at their best.

How lean do the top players need to be? The answer will depend on the ideals of the club’s backroom staff and your position on the pitch. In my experience, these are useful body composition benchmarks to know about:

• Defenders and midfielders are often tasked with maintaining 8-10% body fat.
• Strikers might need to maintain between 9% and 11% body fat.
• Goalkeepers must carry at most 13% body fat.
• Typically, anything above 13% body fat is deemed unacceptable.

Now, I am not suggesting that you need to become this lean pre-season, they're just there as a reference to help you. But it does point to the importance and overall value of getting leaner in the pre-season period. How do you do this? Here comes the challenge.

On the one hand, you are training more during pre-season. The number of sessions goes up. Training intensity increases. You might be at the training ground practising for longer too. To meet these energy demands, you may need to increase calories in the short term compared to normal to fuel performance and meet training needs (Raizel, da Mata Godois et al. 2017).

On the other hand, you want to get leaner, and this requires a calorie deficit. This predicament can create a unique challenge for athletes as they seek to lean out while also having enough energy to get the most gains out of pre-season training and practice (Manore 2015).

If you are looking to get leaner pre-season while committing fully to practice, I recommend some basic steps that can help.

First, identify your daily calorie needs. Many online calculators enable you to work out your ‘maintenance’ calories quickly, accounting for factors like age, activity levels, height and current weight.

The second step is to opt for a gentle to moderate calorie deficit. There are 3500 calories to one pound of body fat (Hall 2008). As such, to lose one pound per week, you would theoretically seek to create a 500-calorie deficit per day. It is important to note, that your starting point can Influence what your overall deficit can look like.

The third step is to track calories, weight, and anthropometrics (body measurements) so that you have feedback as you go. There are several dietary approaches to losing body fat, and no single one has been proven to be superior to another across different populations (Aragon, Schoenfeld et al. 2017). The key is to find the approach that works for you so you can stick with it.

It’s worth noting that in the research, an emerging hypothesis is to leverage carb-cycling to create a calorie deficit yet support performance. With this approach, you take on more carbohydrates in preparation for the harder, longer training sessions and cycle them back on days when the training load is low (Fernandes 2022, Staśkiewicz-Bartecka, Kardas et al. 2024). Adjusting energy and nutrient intake according to the different training phases of your preparation makes sense – albeit it takes planning and focus.

Pre-Season Consideration 2: Fitness levels

Another variable to consider as you begin pre-season is fitness levels. When it comes to football, we’ll often think of building fitness as simply “improving cardio”. And it’s true that you need high aerobic and anaerobic fitness levels to perform well on the pitch (Stølen, Chamari et al. 2005). However, it’s worth broadening the lens here to include other components of fitness, too.

Pre-season is a great time to focus on other fitness components needed for the game: mobility, core stability, strength, acceleration, multi-directional speed, agility and power (Silva, Nassis et al. 2015). A recent meta-analysis found that training these qualities in the gym was useful and helped football performance (Oliver, Ramachandran et al. 2023).

Gym work in pre-season may also help to reduce the risk of injury. A new study looked at the benefit of pre-season gym training that focused on these other components of fitness compared to the traditional cardio-dominant approach. It was found that gym work had a protective effect on players during the season by helping to reduce injury incidence (Belamjahad, Tourny et al. 2024).

Pre-Season Consideration 3: Nutritional needs

Pre-season nutrition can get complicated very quickly, especially if you do not have the support of staff to ensure your meals hit the right level of calories, macronutrients and micronutrients (Staśkiewicz, Grochowska-Niedworok et al. 2022). With this in mind, let’s give you some useful insights from the research to support your pre-season fuelling strategies.

First, let’s talk about hydration. It is very common to go into pre-season training dehydrated, even at the elite level. As many as two-thirds of players go into training insufficiently hydrated (Chapelle, Tassignon et al. 2020). Being hydrated is vital for sports performance because it maintains optimal muscle function, supports energy production, and prevents fatigue, enabling athletes to perform at their peak (Collins, Maughan et al. 2021).

With this in mind, aim to start each training session well-hydrated. A good starting point is 5 to 7 mL/kg body weight in the four hours before a session (Fernandes 2022). So, if you weigh 85kg, you should drink approximately 400- 600 ml pre-training sessions.

Bear in mind that once you start a session, you are playing catch-up because you can lose 500ml to 3 litres of body fluids per hour, depending on the training load and environment (Collins, Maughan et al. 2021) . With this in mind, look to offset the loss of water, salts, and glucose during training with a combination of water, electrolytes, gels and sports drinks as needed.

Second, protein is a priority in pre-season. Why? The training load is high, you need to recover well, and retaining lean muscle whilst in a calorie deficit is very important (Longland, Oikawa et al. 2016). In this way, please do not go into pre-season with a carb-centric view on fuelling. Ensure you take on sufficient protein and use supplements like Kinetica Sports' Whey, Clear Whey Isolate or Plant Protein to hit your numbers in this respect.  

Third, prepare for hard training sessions by taking on sufficient carbohydrates in advance. You need sufficient glycogen (body's stored form of carbohydrate) to perform at your best and to fuel activity on the pitch, and if you go into training with low muscle glycogen, you will tank early and find it much harder to express your skillset (van Loon, Greenhaff et al. 2001, Collins, Maughan et al. 2021).

How can you do this? Based on the recommendations from the UEFA group statement on nutrition, carbohydrate intake should be 6–8 g/kg body mass the day before a heavy training session to elevate muscle and liver glycogen stores (Collins, Maughan et al. 2021). Then, on the morning before practice, consume a carbohydrate-rich meal (1–3 g/kg body mass) to ensure you begin the match with adequate glycogen stores.

Pre-Season Consideration 4: Dietary supplementation

Wherever possible, it’s preferable to take a food-first approach to nutrition. However, there are several supplements that you can leverage to promote a better response to pre-season training load. You will see these listed below:

• Creatine – to promote athletic performance (Mielgo-Ayuso, Calleja-Gonzalez et al. 2019).
• Whey – to enhance recovery following training (Kritikos, Papanikolaou et al. 2022).
• Caffeine – to enhance sprint ability and focus in practice (Gant, Ali et al. 2010)
• Collagen – to support musculoskeletal recovery (Heaton, Davis et al. 2017)

Pre-Season Consideration 5: Health status

It’s also important to consider your health status during pre-season. For example, a sudden increase in training load can challenge the immune system, which is why many people get coughs, colds and respiratory infections after a block of hard training (Gleeson, Nieman et al. 2004, Rico-Gonzalez, Pino-Ortega et al. 2021). With this in mind, it can be helpful to think about supplementation in addition to a healthy diet:

• Probiotics – to support immunity (Mohr, Jager et al. 2020)
• Vitamin D – to support immunity (Bergman, Lindh et al. 2013)
• Magnesium – to support recovery (Heffernan, Horner et al. 2019)
• Collagen – to support recovery (Lee, Bridge et al. 2023)

Pre-Season Consideration 6: Recovery needs  

The final theme to consider in your pre-season is recovery. We are all unique, and the way you respond to a training session will be different from that of your teammates. Research also shows how players respond differently to the same workout (Teixeira, Forte et al. 2021).

Your age, medical history, fitness levels, stress, skill level, and movement quality can all affect how well you recover compared to others. In turn, this can impact your risk of injury unless you place a big focus pre-season on optimising recovery and regeneration after hard training (Windt and Gabbett 2017).

For example, you might find that the day after a session, you experience major DOMs (delayed onset of muscle soreness) compared to others. You might also see a major drop in digital metrics like HRV (heart rate variability) post-session, and this tells you that training had a demonstrable effect on systems (Ayuso-Moreno, Fuentes-García et al. 2021).

The key point here is recovery is important. Please remember that you do not get stronger during a workout or training session but afterwards, as the body heals and adapts. For this reason, factors such as sleep are vital to your pre-season care – ensuring that you start the season feeling fresh, strong and ready to go.

There are many ways to improve sleep through nutrition habits, but simple strategies include the addition of magnesium-rich foods in the evening, such as leafy greens, nuts, seeds and legumes, as well as avoiding eating a main meal within two hours before going to bed. The Kinetica Sports' Zinc-Mag and Collagen Shot can also help with getting better sleep because of the sleep-supportive nutrients it contains, such as glycine (Kawai, Sakai et al. 2015).