When soccer isn’t in season, you need a way to keep your feet nimble and practiced. That’s hard to do in cold weather, and your parents aren’t about to let you kick a soccer ball around the house. So what’s a good way to maintain your skills while keeping things safely inside the house when the weather is cold?
It’s easy: Footbags. Also knows as hackies (which stems from “Hacky Sack,” the original trademarked name of the product), footbags can be a great way to keep your feet in shape and ready for soccer season. You might even try buying some soccer hackies — footbags that look like soccer balls — to keep your mind on the game.
Every pre-season you do a lot of conditioning, and then when the season starts you stop doing all intense-related work because you are afraid the players might get sore or tired during the in-season period. So when the season is over the players have a few weeks (months?) off from training, and then when they start the pre-season again, you start doing all the conditioning all over again.
I have seen this happen for the last 10 years and experienced it myself as a player. At the end of the pre-season, you feel like you are unbeatable, but somewhere during the season you lose that feeling, and when the next pre-season starts again, it feels like you’re starting again from square one. I like to sum this up and give you my idea and explanation on how YOU should set it up. To sum it up, I’d like to quote Will Smith:
“If you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready”
With that being said, if you work on maintaining a good level of conditioning all year round you don’t have to build it back up when the pre-season starts again, you can either take it to the next level or plain and simple just work on what soccer really is all about – playing soccer!
My players have a really great level of conditioning and therefore I am able to really work on developing their ability to play soccer, and develop their ability to play it at a high speed and a high level.
I have been the head coach of my current team for about 1,5 years now, and during that period, we have done a total of 3 sessions (!) where we exclusively focused on conditioning, not related to regular soccer training. Those 3 sessions where done as a Plan B because our training field was covered in snow.
Our philosophy on conditioning for soccer players is that everything can (and should) be performed on the soccer field, during regular soccer training. And most of those sessions can be done with the soccer ball.
I was simply a trainer back then as I had little knowledge of either how to coach or indeed what to coach so we simply did drills that I had seen in books or on the television. It was all ‘old skool’ stuff but very effective for the level we were performing at, and it served me well for my future career. I was fastidious about being able to catch the ball and this was possibly the strongest forte of my game. I attempted to catch absolutely everything possible in training, there are always the inevitable shots that require a palm or a tip away but anything in my proximity I would strive to get hold of, again this is something that I have taken into my coaching – I want to see an attempt to catch the ball in the first instance. It doesn’t overly worry me if you drop it in training as long as you react to the fumble, but if you didn’t try to catch then how would you know what was possible in a game? There are many mantras that I adopt for each and every session and the goalkeepers that I work with quickly become aware of the levels expected of them, I find that by setting not just targets but achievable targets, motivates the goalkeeper into upping their performance and development quicker than a simple pat on the back and a “well done”.
Sitting on the sidelines in discomfort and watching my team was hard, especially as I had been put there by an innocuous challenge, but it certainly sped up my progression into coaching. My posterior cruciate ligament was torn and I was sidelined for a season undergoing regular intensive physiotherapy sessions and a rehab programme. I was well on the road to recovery when I hit from behind when stationary in a road traffic accident and clattered my knee against the dash board due to the inertia caused by the other driver and extensively damaged it again, undoing the months of hard work I’d recently put in. that was it, my playing days were well and truly gone. As with everything I do, if I’m doing something then I aim to be the absolute best that I can be at it and hence I undertook as many coaching qualifications as I possible could fit in in a ridiculously short space of time. I aimed to provide each goalkeeper that I worked with as much insight into the game as physically and mentally possible as I embarked on my new fledgling career as a goalkeeper coach. Having received no specific coaching personally I wasn’t dogged by the “Do it this way” mentality that follows the majority of coaches and I was free to develop my own personal style, ideas and methodology. I am a huge student of how people work and watch many, many coaches in their mannerisms and style and took the bits that would suit me and adapted those that wouldn’t until I found a style that works. And it is with this style that I lead you into the magical world of Coaching the Goalkeeper by Bob Warby
Resource Author Francisco Rodriguez Higueras
Encontrar un Trabajo – Empleo es fácil si sabe dónde buscar
Trabajar desde casa es fácil si sabes como
Todo sobre Juegos Mario para gente que le gusta jugar
Tags: soccer