What Did I Just Witness? How Can a Club of This Caliber Be So Far Behind in the Gym?

As a hobbyist powerlifter, I’m genuinely baffled by the training methods I just saw in this video. This isn’t just unconventional—it’s downright counterproductive. These exercises don’t seem to offer any tangible benefits for football performance or injury prevention. Let's break down what's going wrong here:

  1. Koundé's Exercise (First Clip): What is he trying to achieve? Rear delts? Side delts? Whatever the goal is, kicking the ball while doing this, with poor form, isn’t going to help him achieve it. This does nothing to enhance football-specific skills or improve his physical conditioning.

  2. The One-Legged Squats with a Plate (Second Clip): If you’re trying to build leg strength, core stability, or explosiveness, this exercise is a disaster. Not only is it horribly unstable, but Toni’s is pushing the plate perpendicular to gravity, so it’s not even providing resistance where it should. The elevated leg position seems like a recipe for injury, especially considering how unstable the whole movement is. All this achieves is som unwanted knee joint stress. There are far better, safer exercises that actually target leg strength, core stability, or knee joint health.

3.Hitting a Ball with a Plate (Later Clips): What is the objective here? Are they training for baseball? This exercise looks completely out of place in a football training regimen. It seems neither functional nor relevant to the sport.

Honestly, it’s no wonder we see better athletes in the NFL and NBA. Their gym training is on another level, focusing on building real strength, explosiveness, and injury prevention. Meanwhile, football seems to be stuck in outdated, ineffective methods.

There’s no way these exercises are coming from qualified strength
strength and conditioning coaches. I’ve seen other top clubs performing similar questionable training practices, so this isn’t just a Barça problem—it’s a football-wide issue.

It’s no wonder our players keep getting injured. With training like this
Modern football demands athleticism, strength, and resilience more than ever, yet it seems like the sport is still so far behind in the gym.

by AboudSh

2 comments

  1. Stability.

    Stability is one of the most important things in football. Knee stability, ankle stability, core stability.

    All football clubs have different gym sessions for different things. The gym session in this video is focused on stability. I have also seen videos of gym sessions focused on muscle building, and sessions focused on explosiveness (Plyometrics.)

    Strength in football is mostly down to stability. As you need to be able to withstand movements while running at full speed.

    Footballers don’t need to be doing deadlifts and heavy squats, as it’s unnecessary for what they do, and increase the chance of injury.

    Why do you think so many top football clubs do these exercises? It’s not because all of their strength and conditioning coaches are useless

    I used to be in an academy for a championship team, and muscle building sessions were not as common as the others.

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