How Douglas Costa Trains To Build Strength And Prevent Injury

How Douglas Costa trains to build strength, speed and prevent injury

Australian football rarely sees a talent like Douglas Costa. We sat down with the superstar winger and Under Armour ambassador to discuss his training plan, life in Australia and his final goals before retirement

I WAS NOT introduced to Douglas Costa by the usual means. Circa 2018, I wasn’t hugely into football outside of the World Cup and had no interest in waking up in the early hours of the morning to watch European, club-level games. I had, however, just purchased the most recent instalment in the enormously popular FIFA video game franchise, FIFA 19, and needed to select a team that would help me defeat my friend in a one-on-one matchup.

Figuring that speed would doubtlessly be a useful skill in a video game, I Googled ‘fastest player in FIFA 19’. The result: Douglas Costa. Then 27, Costa was a stalwart in Juventus’ lineup and boasted a ‘pace’ rating of 95 – the highest in the game. This attribute, combined with a 91 ‘dribbling’ rating, made Costa a game-breaking player that was renowned within the FIFA community. Sure enough, I ran circles around my opponent’s defenders with Costa on my team and thoroughly embarrassed my friend.

All of this is to say that – in video game form or not – Costa is one of the most physically gifted footballers of the last decade. His freakish speed and otherworldly athleticism allowed him to blow games wide open with a moment’s finesse, making him an indispensable figure in a number of the world’s top teams – from Bayern Munich and Juventus, where he formed a deadly forward partnership with Cristiano Ronaldo, to the Brazilian national side.

All in all, Costa is a three-time Serie A champion, three-time Bundesliga champion, a Club World Cup winner, and has amassed 31 appearances for Brazil, including at the 2018 World Cup. He didn’t reach such heights through natural gifts. At 172 centimetres tall, Costa is often the smallest player on the field. You wouldn’t know it from how he plays, though. Costa’s size allows him to lose defenders with ease, and he’s a surprisingly physical player, who isn’t afraid to make contact with defenders – often, he’ll even overpower them.

It would be a disservice to call Costa’s physical talents gifts. They didn’t come as some stroke of luck or divine provenance, but through an unflinching commitment to pushing himself and training harder than the next guy. It’s that same approach that still guides Costa to this day.

Douglas Costa

When I meet Costa, it’s at Sydney FC’s Centre of Excellence, Sky Park. Arriving to our interview wearing an Under Armour hoodie and tracksuit pants, Costa has just wrapped up a training session and is decompressing in his go-to post-workout clothes. He signed on as an Under Armour Ambassador not long after arriving in Australia and has already felt the benefits of the brand’s apparel on the field. “To collab together and be involved together has been good; it motivates me to play better,” he says. “The shoes are the best, really. I like the feel, they’re comfortable, they make me feel confident and let me do what I want to do on the field.”

Costa is still training with the regular team despite battling a nagging hamstring injury that has kept him out of action since late-December. This added workload, as Sydney’s Head of Sports Science and Performance Alex Scardino later tells me, is entirely optional, but Costa wants to be back on the field as soon as possible. “He’s prepared to put in the work,” Scardino says.

Given his extensive training schedule, I wouldn’t fault Costa for shirking his media duties and blasting through our allotted time with monosyllabic answers, but the 34-year-old is relaxed and cooperative. Reserved yet attentive and considerate in his responses, Costa speaks six languages – Portuguese, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian and German – a side effect of his globe-trotting career.

For Costa, being sidelined with an injury is frustratingly difficult. “I always want to be on the field, but it’s hard,” he says. “I do everything I can, like right now I’m training very hard to come back as soon as possible.”

When Costa went down with his current injury, Sydney was in the midst of a six-game unbeaten streak. They’ve now gone winless in their last three games and have dropped to seventh on the A-League table. It’s easy to see why Costa is eager to get back out there.

Despite his team’s dip in form in his absence, Costa is confident that the Sky Blues will be contending for the league’s top honour upon his return. “We are here to win titles and now I think we are still in a good place in the table,” he says. “I can see this team has good leadership, everyone works hard and we can win titles, but we are just taking it game by game and match by match.”

Injury troubles are nothing new to Costa. He’s been plagued by injuries throughout his career, from niggles in his hamstrings and calves to strains in his shoulders and abductor muscles. Surprisingly, Costa says these setbacks have had a beneficial effect by strengthening his resolve and teaching him how to handle challenges. “I have had problems with injuries for a long time, but now I know how to stop them and recover from them as well,” he says. When I ask him if he trains as hard as what he did when he was younger, Costa is initially contemplative, but comes to a resolute conclusion. “I have always trained hard,” he says.

You might assume that Costa’s current workload is lighter than usual due to his ongoing injury trouble, but you’d be wrong. I made that false assumption, asking Costa how often he trains. The 34-year-old, seemingly offended by my apparent affront to his work ethic, laughs before answering, “Every day.” Instead, he’s going above and beyond to recover. “Tomorrow I have training as well because I’m not involved in the game, so I’m going to train by myself here.”

Douglas Costa

Douglas Costa’s training routine

Costa’s training plan is designed by Sydney FC’s high performance staff, a group headed by Scardino. At the moment, the focus is firmly on rehabbing his injury and getting him back on the field as soon as possible. “If we have a player in rehab like Douglas, they’re still coming in every day to get better,” Scardino says. “Our approach is to respect the injury and the pathology of it, but also to get players back out there as quick as possible.”

For Costa, that approach means an intensive routine that rotates between injury assessment, on-field training and conditioning in the gym. “Usually he’s in here at 9am for breakfast and then treatment and assessment. Then he does some prehab and activation, on-pitch rehab, before heading to the gym to work through his strength block for whatever day it is. He’ll do recovery after that as well as some more post-session exercises,” Scardino says. All of this takes place before lunch. What’s more, Costa is not one to jump at some time off. “Hard workers like Douglas will come in on their scheduled days off to do extra rehab,” says Scardino.

Sydney FC’s training schedule looks fairly similar for players who aren’t injured, according to Scardino. The key difference being that they spend more time in the gym and on the field, with less time in rehab. One aspect that remains is strength work and conditioning, which is a daily occurrence with players alternating between muscle groups.

This routine needs to be flexible, according to Scardino, due to the scheduling of matchdays. On the day after a game the focus is always on recovery, and the intensity of training gradually decreases as the team gets closer to game day. Weeks with multiple games present another challenge, with the difficult task of balancing game-readiness with the risk of burnout.

A great deal of work also goes into injury prevention, with players at a higher risk of injury often putting in extra work. “We look at a player’s history and their age,” says Scardino. “So someone like Douglas, who has had a lot of major injuries and is now heading towards the end of his career, has to do a lot of work for injury prevention. But he’s a great athlete, a good performer, he’s had a phenomenal career and he’s a good worker.”

For now, Costa is giving his all to training, with the aim of securing a few more trophies before retirement. Although, that level of dedication can’t last forever. At 34, Costa could potentially play for another half-decade, but his injury history will make that difficult, as he readily acknowledges.

What comes next remains to be seen, but Costa has put some thought into his future and where he’ll spend it – and the ease with which he has settled into life in Australia may influence his decision. “For me it’s amazing. My family just arrived like two weeks ago and they really like living here. The lifestyle is good for us and we have a lot of things we want to do here,” he says. “I don’t know if I will be here for the rest of my life, but I will play another year or two years, and I think Sydney will be my last club.”

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By Cayle Reid

Cayle Reid is a fan of everything sports and fitness. He spends his free time at the gym, on his surfboard or staying up late watching sports in incompatible time zones.

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