Al-Ittihad Women's Spain Camp: The Fitness Behind Saudi Women's Football

Inside the Spain camp

Goal reports the camp mixed hard conditioning with tactical work and friendlies, including a benchmark test against Barcelona B's side. New signing Lareen Bassiouni, brought in from Al-Ahly, made her debut during the trip, lining up alongside captain Bayan Sadaqah, goalkeeper Zala Mersnik, defender Ashleigh Plumptre and forward Retaj Al-Thabiti, with midfielder Saba Tawfiq returning from injury. Al-Ittihad finished third last season and are clearly building toward a stronger campaign.

A league growing fast

The backdrop matters. The Saudi Women's Premier League ran its 2025-26 season from September to April with eight teams, organised by the Saudi Arabian Football Federation and now broadcast across the region by MBC, with Al-Nassr taking a fourth straight title. It is a competition maturing quickly in step with Vision 2030's push to get more women active — and pre-season camps like this one are the clearest sign that clubs are treating fitness as seriously as any men's side.

The four pillars of football fitness

So what does that fitness actually look like? According to ISSA, football conditioning trains four qualities together, and a good pre-season builds them in order — the aerobic base first, then strength, speed and agility layered on top.

How to build football fitness yourself

You can copy the shape of a pro camp on your own schedule. Start with the base, then add the sharper work as you go.

1. Build your engine first. Two or three weekly sessions of running and interval training give you the stamina everything else sits on.
2. Get strong where football needs it. Functional strength for the legs, core and torso — bodyweight, medicine balls or light weights — protects your knees and ankles as much as it adds power.
3. Add speed and agility. Short sprints and cone drills, with and without a ball, train the acceleration and direction changes that matches are won on.
4. Train with people and, if you can, a coach. A few sessions with a personal trainer or a women-only space keeps the work structured and consistent.

Football fitness questions, answered

How many days a week should I train?

For a solid base, two to three focused sessions a week is plenty to build stamina and strength without burning out. Pre-season is about consistency across months rather than one heroic week — the pros build their camps around steady, repeatable load for exactly that reason, and an amateur getting fit for a weekend kickabout is no different.

Do I really need a ball to get football-fit?

No. Most of the fitness that shows up on the pitch — the running base, the leg and core strength, the sprint speed — is built in the gym and on the track before a ball is involved. Add ball work when you can, but the engine comes first, which is why professional camps front-load conditioning before tactics and set-pieces.

Bring the camp mindset to your own training

Al-Ittihad's players are proof that football fitness is built, not born — brick by brick, in a room like the one at your nearest GymNation gym in Jeddah. Come and try it with a free day pass and start building the engine your game needs.

Sources:
goal.com
issaonline.com
en.wikipedia.org

The opinions shared in the GymNation blog articles are solely those of the respective authors and may not represent the perspectives of GymNation or any member of the GymNation team.