I think bulking up is part of the problem. Bulking up so quickly puts extra strain on your tendons and ligaments. I feel like this is where we go wrong in English football with foreign players. We always want them to put on a ton off muscle and bulk up, but I don't see the same abroad. You can become stronger without adding so much bulk to your build, Salah is a good example of this. He was slim and weak for us, and at Liverpool he has been much stronger without really filling out too much. He just added muscle to his already slim build. City's players are the same. Mahrez was skinny as a rake, but he wasn't forced to bulk up. Sterling, Bernardo Silva, they were the same.
When we had Willian, we didn't force him to bulk up. His build never changed from day 1.
I rarely see any advantages to filling out in modern football. It's better to add muscle to your natural build without adding all of that bulk.
It isn't limited to foreign players and isn't particularly English tbh. Through friends working in sports science/S&C at PL and Championship level, it seems the common concern is actually that football managers don't devote enough time to strength & conditioning work at all levels, and that players think they can fill the gap by hiring a personal trainer to work on their 'fitness'.
Research shows that training
must be sports-specific to the movement patterns of that sport, and training
must be individualised to the player. Football has somewhat embraced the former, but there are huge practical obstacles to the sport engaging in the latter. The goal is to optimise for repeated explosive movements. Most of my friends who actually work in this profession believe the ultimate goal is essentially to build lean muscle without increasing body mass through excess fat or hypertrophy.
Football managers have in their head that players need to
look stronger. Players worry they won't get picked if they don't bulk up. Especially in this modern tactico era, managers have no interest in taking time away from video tactics sessions. So players often 'take initiative' by hiring their own staff to train them outside the club; these professionals don't have access to the training data that an in-house sports scientist or conditioning coach has, so they program differently. The player ends up with a mish-mash of competing expectations and methods from the manager, his fitness coach, the club's medical personnel and their own personal trainer. But going back to the research, it is not effective at either improving performance or reducing injury unless it is targeted, sports-specific and individualised to that player.
This is actually one of the things that IMO most points to BlueCo's ineptitude - American sports are so far ahead of the PL in terms of sports science, that expertise and practice is one of the few things that could genuinely have revolutionised the PL much like Wenger did back in the 1990s. Yet not an ounce of that has been used in England by BlueCo, except for that one time they went doctor-shopping to find someone willing to clear Wesley Fofana on a medical.
