Fitness is the ability to cope effectively with the stresses of everyday life. Everyone's lifestyle is different so the amount of stress and levels of fitness also differ. If you have a laid back lifestyle then the level of fitness required is quite minimal, so two or three walks a week should be sufficient. Whereas is you play regular competitive sport a lot of hard training would be needed to maintain the high level of fitness.

Fitness is made up of several components which are divided into two groups:-

Health-related components – aerobic capacity, strength, flexibility, and body composition. These contribute towards a healthy body. Everyone would benefit by developing these components of fitness to a certain degree.

Skill-related components – speed, power, balance, reaction time co-ordination, and agility. These aspects of fitness are much more appropriate to the sp

As outlined above agility is definitely needed in goal keeping. It is also needed in outfield players

Increase in tolerance to lactic acid – enables the athlete to work for longer whilst relying heavily on the lactic acid system. Athletes can recover more quickly because they are more efficient at tolerating high levels of lactic acid and can remove it more rapidly.

These are the health related components that I think are involved in football.

To improve your strength you need to work against a resistance. You can work specifically depending on what type of strength you would like to improve and also you could take into account which type of muscle contraction you want to perform. E.g. concentric, eccentric. Any strength training programme will include repetitions and sets. The number of repetitions performed will depend on the type of strength being improved. For maximum strength you would only do 6 repetitions per set because you would be working to maximum using your fast twitch muscle fibres and they rely on the anaerobic energy systems, and so you will fatigue very quickly. For strength endurance you will do anything from 10 – 20 repetitions per set. Intensity is a factor also. If you were to improve your maximum strength then you would need to determine the maximum weight that you can lift successfully 6 times – low repetitions of high weights. However, for strength endurance the number of repetitions will be high and the resistance will be relatively low. It is possible to improve strength by working isometrically using static resistance. Here the strength is only improved at a certain joint angle, whereas improving the muscle strength using concentric and eccentric muscle contraction improves the muscle strength at all angles. Various strength training methods are –

Some topics in this essay:
Strength Strength, Static Flexibility, Astrand Swedish, , Blood Acidity, Energy Stores, Co-ordination Co-ordination, Heart Rate, Balance Balance, Lung Volumes, vo2 max, aerobic capacity, strength endurance, fast glycolytic, cardiac output, aerobic system, †muscle, body weight, slow oxidative, maximum strength, ml/min/kg body weight, fast glycolytic fibres, muscle cell increases, percentage fast glycolytic, †muscle cell,