SOCCER

Building bigger, stronger muscles depends on three factors: heredity, exercise, and your diet.In contact sports like wrestling and football, only the strong survive. Stronger muscles can improve your performance in any sport.  For example, stronger muscles can increase your speed when running, your force when throwing or hitting a ball, and your endurance in any athletic event. So all athletes, male or female, can benefit from stronger muscles.

The size and strength of your muscles depend on three factors: heredity, exercise, and diet.

HEREDITY
Everyone is born with a slightly different combination of three types of muscle fibers.

• Fast-twitch fibers work rapidly but tire quickly.
• Slow-twitch fibers don't work as fast, but they have greater endurance.
• Intermediate-twitch fibers produce more power than slow-twitch but can be trained to have high aerobic capacity.
  
  

Athletes with more fast-twitch fibers than slow tend to be better sprinters. Those with more slow-twitch fibers than fast are better in marathons. There's nothing you can do to change his. However, you can increase the size and strength of the muscle fibers you've inherited.

EXERCISE
Exercise can build larger, stronger muscles. Muscles building depends on three basic principles; specificity, overload, and progression.

• Specificity--to develop a specific muscle, it must be exercised.
• Overload--to strengthen a muscle, it must work more than normal.  
• Progression--the work load must be increased gradually.
  
  

Let's say you want to develop stronger biceps.

• To develop your biceps, do exercises like the barbell curl (specificity). Warm up with a light weight (about half the weight you can lift correctly).
  
  
• Using the barbell curl, start with a weight you can lift correctly 10 times. Try to do three sets of these during a workout.
  
  
• Once you can do three sets of 10 correctly in a workout, increase the weight by five pounds (overload).
  
  
• Repeat the same steps until you can lift the new weight for three sets of 10. Then add five more pounds. As you get stronger, gradually increase the weight of the barbells (progression).
  
  
• Over a four-week period, exercising three times a week, you should see noticeable improvements in the strength of your biceps.
  
  
• Don't try to lift weights every day. Rest one day between workouts to give your muscles time to grow.
  
  

Specificity, overload, and progression can be used to develop other muscles too. These principles can be applied to activities other than weight lifting, such as running to increase leg strength.

In addition to exercise, your muscles need a nutritionally adequate diet. A nutritionally adequate diet includes a wide variety of foods from the Five Food Groups (Milk, Meat, Vegetable, Fruit, and Grain). This diet supplies your body with all the nutrients you need for top performance.

Despite popular opinion, you do not need large amounts of protein to build muscles. Your muscles are only 22 percent protein and more than 70 percent water. A growing athlete only needs about 1/2 to 1 gram of protein for each pound of body weight. 

So an athlete who weighs 150 pounds needs about 75 grams of protein.

The following sample menu is nutritionally adequate and supplies more than enough protein for muscle building.

When you eat more protein than your body needs, your body does one of two things. It either uses the excess protein for energy or turns it to fat.  Excess protein does not turn into muscle. So extra protein does not improve your performance. In addition, high-protein diets increase your body's water requirement.

Some body builders take steroids in the hope of developing huge muscles.  However, steroids can be dangerous. 

The American Medical Association and the American College of Sports Medicine do not recommend using them. 

Steroids have been banned by the International Olympic Committee.

These drugs can stunt your growth, cause acne, deepen your voice, and alter your sex organs. Some of these side effects can be permanent. You can make the same gains with diet and exercise. Although it takes longer, you're not risking your health.