Today, Fitness Daily welcomes Mati Bishop to our writing staff. Mati plays soccer, volleyball and just about every other team sport known to man with the exception of cricket, which he is dying to try. He is also a martial artist, freediver and runner. He’s known for having so much fun that he forgets he’s getting fit.

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Team sports can take the sting out of fitness

I seem to remember a song from way back when that went something along the lines of “Working out is hard to do.” Ok, maybe I’ve got the catchy tune right but not the exact lyrics, but that’s what goes through my head every time that I try to get in the car by myself to head to the gym. I just don’t get excited about heading out to the gym or putting headphones on and heading out for a long run. A few years back, I did find something that I get really excited about.

Soccer.

I’d never played before, but some friends invited me out to kick the ball around and next thing I knew I was part of a team training twice a week! .

Finding somewhere to play soccer
The key to getting involved with soccer is finding a group of people that are of a similar skill level as you. Search the internet for “recreational adult soccer” in your town and see what you come across. Most leagues will have a variety of skill levels from divisions comprised of former college players to curious players who have never played before.

If you’ve never played before, start at the beginning no matter how good an athlete you are. Soccor is great fun – but you want to learn how to play at the same time others are. There’s nothing fun about running around clueless while your team fumes and the other team chuckes.

Most leagues have a “players looking for teams” list that can you sign up for. (Hint: if you are a woman, sign up for a co-ed team. There are almost always plenty of spots available for girls with cleats.)

The reason for this is a thing called your first touch which we’ll talk about later. If you have some friends to join you in the adventure, all the better. If not, most leagues have a “players looking for teams” list that you can sign up for. If you happen to be a girl, odds are good that you will find a co-ed (made up of boys and girls) team before you know it. Girls with cleats are always in demand.

Here is what you’ll need to join a soccer league

One of the reason that soccer is so popular around the world is requires little more than a ball and a bit of space. But, even though could play barefoot on a parking lot, doesn’t mean you should.

Cleats or Turf Shoes- Nothing says overcompensating like a player that wears $200 soccer cleats and has never played before. I recommend starting with a pair of $50 cleats (for example, these) that are tight fitting, but comfortable. You want to have very little room in the toe of the boot (cool European soccer fans call them football boots instead of soccer cleats) as possible. This will give you a better touch on the ball which is going to be very important.

Shin Guards- Bigger is better when you’re getting started. Experienced players brag about how small their shin guards are. This machismo is great, until you actually get kicked in the shin. I highly recommend a pair of shin guards that also has protection for you ankle. After a match or two, you’ll understand why. (Here’s a good choice.)

Big ‘ol Socks- Find a good pair of soccer socks. Darker is easier to clean.
It’s that easy.

Even though someone on the team is guaranteed to have a ball with them, you’ll still want to get one of your own. You don’t need to spend a fortune on a soccer ball – just get something decent in the $20 range.

Training Before You Play
You are going to be running on the soccer field. A lot. Just showing up, tying your laces, and giving it a go is a great way to get injured. Make sure you

Just showing up to play a soccer game is a bad idea. Here are a few exercises that you should do several times a week for a couple weeks before your first match to help reduce your chance of injury.

Lunges- Simple lunges are important to help build the structural muscles that will allow your legs to avoid injury during the stopping, starting and changing of directions during the course of a soccer match. Do 20-30 lunges with each leg, each workout.

Crunches- I didn’t discover how much of an impact core strength had on my game until well over a year after I started playing. When I got my core in shape, I found that I was faster and had better balance than ever before, give yourself a head start. 100 crunches a day will get you heading in the right direction.

Ski Hops- During a soccer match, your ankles will be under stress every time that you change direction. To do this exercise start with your feet together, like a skier with their skis parallel, and hop at a 45 degree angle to either direction, then hop immediately 45 degrees in the other direction. Move forward about fifteen feet in this manner, rest and repeat at least three times.

Getting Better
So, you’ve paid your league fee, bought your gear and played your first match. Now is the time when you’ve probably realized that you need to get better. The good news is that you can improve considerably, while getting a great workout in a short amount of time. All you need is your ball and a wall.

Improving Your First Touch- Nothing will make you a better soccer player than improving your first touch. A first touch is just what it sounds like, your first touch when someone kicks you the ball. The more control you have the more options to do something productive for your team. Start with the ball at your feet 10 feet in front of the wall. Kick the ball to the wall so that it rolls back to you. Concentrate on touching the ball just enough so it stops perfectly at your feet so you can kick it right back at the wall. It takes some time, but this drill will pay huge dividends.

Striking the Ball- Move a bit further back from the wall and choose a target on the wall. Now, kick the ball at your target. You can increase the distance as you get better. From close to the wall, kick with the inside of your foot. As you move further back, kick the ball with the laces of you boot, focusing on keeping your head down and your weight moving forward over the ball as you strike it.

Moving With the Ball in Your Feet- Getting comfortable with how it feels to have the ball in your feet will slow the game down for you and give you more time to decide who to pass to or whether or not to take a shot. To improve this the simplest way is to practice moving with the ball in different directions. Start slowly, walking is ok, and focus on how you have to touch the ball to control it. As you get more comfortable, increase your speed.

Those three drills will give you a solid 30-45 minute workout with nothing more than a ball and a wall to work with. One last thing, when you work on these drills, use both feet equally. It is extremely important to be able to play with both feet.

Final Tip
Playing 90 minutes of soccer is brutal on a body, especially if you’re out of shape. Make sure that you’re team has extra players so that you can sub out of the match to take a break. It will improve your experience and that of your teammates if your realistic about your ability in the beginning. Winning isn’t everything, but it is fun, so bring a controlled competitive spirit with you on game day and have a great time.

Today, we welcome Mark Remmington to Fitness-Daily.com.

Mark is an author, coach, motivational speaker and award-winning chef who is making a (hopefully triumphant!) return to high level fitness and competition in his mid-forties after a long absence.

He lives in north Idaho with his beautiful wife Lisa, and their dog and three cats.

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I’ve always been an athlete. Approaching my early (okay, okay, MID) forties, I was STILL an athlete, though, in hindsight, I was doing a better job staying in tip-top shape in my mind than on the roads or in the gym. I still got out for three or four miles of jogging (edging toward three) and did fifty pushups a couple of times a week, and boy, let me tell ya, there’s nothing like a good double cheeseburger to help you recover after a workout like that!

As a guy of the male variety, especially a former in-shape, competitive guy, I think that most fitness minded men have a—however slight—tendency to create mental pictures of themselves that are slightly more, for lack of a better word, “flattering” than reality would suggest.

Actually, in all honesty, from my extensive research (I asked two male friends, both of whom were actively exercising with chilled mugs of their favorite workout recovery beverage down at Rocky’s), I would have to say that this is as close to a Universal Male Truth as I can find: Man stands in front of the mirror fresh out of the shower, water cascading down their manly, muscular chest, admiring the slim, lean, ‘V” shape before them.

Okay, so MAYBE the “love handles” are showing a little more love, but all in all, still a pretty fine figure of a man. Except for a couple (say, thirty) of those easy-to-lose-if-I-really-wanted-to pounds, we’re not much different than the guys in the NFL, the male gymnasts in Beijing, the boys on the Navy SEAL poster in our son’s room, or the guy who wore those size 30 waist Levi 501’s with the high black boots back in high school! I mean, c’mon! Do we step on the scale? Nah, there’s no need… it’s all about the “quality,” and everyone knows muscle weighs more than fat anyway!

This next bit is one of the few areas where, believe it or not, men and woman differ: You see, a man’s “critical” observation of his physique stops there, and we get dressed. Total time from “in-the-shower-to-out-the-door:” nine minutes.

Besides hair, makeup and actually caring how they look, the real reason a woman needs forty-five minutes is that a woman will turn and look from the side, then turn and use a hand held mirror to look from the rear. They will actually have extra mirrors installed in the bathroom at strategic angles to make sure they don’t miss anything. Now, even if they’re like my wife and watch what they eat, work out six times a week, and truly can fit in the clothes they wore in high school (leg warmers and all), they will pronounce that they are “fat.” (As an aside, men also watch what they eat, and there’s nothing like watching a plate of chili cheese fries disappear to make a guy feel proud!)

There isn’t a “real” man since 1954 who has turned sideways and looked in the mirror, except by accident, and that guy is still in therapy. We all know, through genetic imprinting, that a man’s best “profile” is head on. No question. If we were actually duct taped to a moving dolly and FORCED to turn sideways and confront our “lateral” view, the shock to our egos and our communal male reality would likely do us in as a species. The fact is, that despite that “sexy” frontal “V,” from the side, the result is more “pyramidal,” shall we say, despite our best efforts to “suck it in.” If we were absolutely forced to acknowledge the truth, in the cold, harsh light of the bathroom, we would have to admit that from the side, we’re starting to resemble “Free Willy” more than Michael Phelps.

The other very scary piece of evil technology is photographs. Now, people have said that pictures don’t lie, but I argue that on two points:

1) If you think pictures don’t lie, you don’t have an expensive enough computer, and…
2) There’s no darn way I looked like THAT!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but after looking at pictures from our Hawaii trip last summer, I would say that a picture is worth about a thousand ounces! And, my friends, here is where modern technology and thousands of years of genetic programming come into conflict.

Personally, I’m pretty sure that the folks at the photo developing shop are secretly in league with Jenny Craig, and are manipulating the so-called “evidence” to increase sales. It was pointed out to me by my wife—who had a suspiciously sardonic twinkle in her eye—that we were using a digital camera. Couple this with the fact that the nearest Jenny Craig office was nowhere near our beach in Maui, and I was forced to face one of man’s harshest realities: our camera was obviously broken.

Okay; looking at it in from a purely scientific point of view (as all men are born naturally technologically inclined, with perfect ingrained senses of direction), it had to be the camera, because there was, scientifically speaking, no way that the slightly sunburned Michelin Man on the beach was me!

Seriously!

The much easier to swallow and obviously more believable solution is that there’s some sort of male-centric conspiracy going on between the electronics industry (Traitors! Who buys all yer’ big screen TVs anyway?) and the evil tofu-diet-bean sprout lobby!

The reason I say this is that my wife looked good in her pictures, but myself, and most of the other men on the beach behind me, looked vaguely—pear shaped, I suppose. Now, purely by accident, we had stumbled on to a “clothing optional” beach, and this just lent an even more macabre feel to this entire developing nightmare.

So, I did what any self-respecting male would do when confronted with such a life-altering disaster: I lay down in the sand, sucked my gut in, had a wine cooler, and then pulled my hat down over my eyes, and pretended I was asleep, topless beach notwithstanding.

But, dear readers, sleep wouldn’t come. Visions of my father coming out of the surf, wearing my swimsuit and my hat kept dancing through my head, along with sugarplums and candy. The only problem was that the sugarplums looked like Chris Farley, and the candy like John Candy. The only blessing is that Speedos were long out of fashion.

That evening, after we returned to our condo, I braced myself by taking several deep breaths. As a health tip to all of you, several deep breaths is one of the healthiest, best ways to calm your nerves and get your emotions under control, especially when combined with two largish glasses of red wine.

Ready for what I was beginning to feel was “the inevitable,” I went into the bathroom, turned the lights on, and looked, actually looked at myself critically for the first time since, oh, I don’t know… high school, maybe. Yes, my cringing brothers, I actually—gulp—turned and looked from the side, and here’s the scariest part: I DIDN’T EVEN SUCK MY GUT IN! Yes, I know, and I apologize for the queasy feeling in your stomachs.

All joking aside, I’ve got to tell you that that vision was instantly burned into my brain, and will stay with me for years. Honestly, I couldn’t take it for more than a second or two. Oh, my eyes, my eyes!

As a kid, I loved my dad, as most of us do, and he was always a special, kind, thoughtful man, but, bless his heart, I always remember him as having a gut. It was the “jiggles like a bowl full of jelly,” type of stomach, rather like Santa, but it was always there. One of my fondest memories was us bugging him gently about it one day, and him sucking his stomach in, and saying that he was “190 pounds of springy blue steel.” Now, all excuses aside, there I was, and truth be told, my unsucked gut was almost as big as I remember his being! Okay, I’m taller, and I do have bigger shoulders and chest, but as far as just pure “gutness” is concerned, I was in the same church, even if I was sitting in a different pew. 214 pounds of springy blue steel, anyone?

Now, to add insult to injury, and likely due to the effects of the vino, I went where no man should go: I went into the living room, and yes, gasp, I ASKED MY WIFE HOW I LOOKED! I’ll pause for a second while you all pick yourselves up off the floor.

Okay, ready? My wife, the beautiful, wonderful, kind, empathetic (and skinny) creature that she is, said what every loving wife would say: “You look fine, honey.”

But I had the bit between my teeth, and wasn’t going to be placated by a simple “fine!” She was going to have to work way harder to restore my fragile and delicate male ego tonight.

Now, you may be asking yourself why I would even push the issue, especially after the “horror show” revelations of moments ago. And remember that besides generations of genetic conditioning, there was the 18 years of rose-colored-glasses-with-blinders-on effect at work, as well.

Could I have been “talked down” by my wife? Yes. Could I have blamed it on “gravitational shift?” Absolutely. Did I want an excuse to continue with my happy existence in my happy world of deluded self-perception? Sure. Could I live, fulfilled, as Cleopatra? You know, “Queen of de nial?” Why not? But, as fate would have it, my wife didn’t get the warning signs, or more precisely, she tried, and I blew it by pressing.

“No, seriously. Am I getting a bit, you know, heavier than I was?”

Now it was serious. She put her book down (coincidentally entitled “Leadership and Self Deception.” No joke.), looked at me full on, and then, my world fell in.

“Well, maybe a little, but there’s just more of you to love! You’re cuddly now.”

I was stunned. My entire frame of existence was shattered. I was suddenly transported into the Twilight Zone, sponsored by Weight Watchers! Cuddly?!? I was instantly dizzy, and sat down, suddenly aware of the sounds of the springs creaking under my weight. The entire spectrum of excuses ran through my head: it’s natural at my age, the job has been stressful, sore ankle, client dinners… but none of them could change the reality: I was getting fat! Me, the eternal athlete, who swore he would never get fat, was sitting in a groaning wicker lounger, having been sliced to slivers—cut to the quick—by my own loving wife

Let’s just say that the Night of Horrors was just beginning, and, my friends, I will share the gory details with you when next we meet. Until then, be healthy!