I've seen how a few different coaches go about teaching kicking mechanics and a lot of it is not really in line with what I've read about on that subject - not that it's necessarily wrong though.
I'm known at my footy club (I assume so anyway) for being able to kick quite well, especially the low and hard stab pass which I think is the holy grail of kicks in football as that kick can be put into a spot that doesn't seem to be there and thus opens so many more options off the back of it.
Growing up in country Victoria in the 80's there was no Auskick or anything and the youngest grade of footy was under 14's.
At 8 years old, about 125cms and 25kgs I started playing and training under 14's with my brothers, having been asked to come over join by the coach 1 night when I just tagged along for something to do.
I'm not sure if I was still doing it at 8 but definitely at 5 or 6 I was that kid who would push the ball down onto his foot when he kicked.
Now I don't know where I picked that up from so why did I do it?
From what I know now it was probably just a matter of my body self organising itself to get ball to foot in the most efficient way possible but at some point I developed the correct way to kick.
No coaching.
No cues.
No hands here, foot here, hip this, balance arm that - my brain self-organised again based on my environment of watching my brothers train, playing with them and the neighbourhood kids in the park around the corner and watching the then VFL on TV.
Not an ounce of coaching.
So today I got tagged in a Facebook post that asked the question - "...Why does pointing the toe towards the target make the ball go lower?..."
Good question I suppose, I don't know, but then I thought I'd video some of my own kicks while I ran the dog after school drop off this morning.
Here's a normal go back and kick for distance kick on top with my stab pass kick on the bottom:
Here's a still image of my ball contact, as wonky as it is from trying to not kick it straight into the dogs mug who has to stand right in front of you and follows the ball like a hawk, and is why she normally is not allowed to come when the footy is out:
As you can see on both kicks my foot is pointed down, although it looks like I'm pointing a little bit more on the left/stab pass kick but I want you to look further then that.
Look at the position of my left leg in both images - it's more out in front of my body'smidline in the right side/distance kick but way closer in towards my body's midline on the left/stab pass kick.
What you really need to look at is the lower leg limb and then the foot angle which now looks very similar to each other.
So back to the question - "...Why does pointing the toe towards the target make the ball go lower?.."
I'd say it doesn't because I've shown here that both high and low kicks can be done with a pointed foot BUT it does stop the ball from going too high and loopy but I'd also put out there that the kickers body angles will also be playing a large part in that too as I'll discuss later this week.
I also want to touch on to about what I don't believe these new kicking programs offer is enough focus on manipulating constraints to almost force the kick you want the kicker to do.
You can manipulate constraints quite easily through altering the task, environment or the task which is the Constraints Led Approach to skill development and is a whole different topic for another day.
Then I would like to see some context thrown in to see if what has been taught has been learnt in a game simulated environment where decision making under pressure and thus the psychological co-active becomes the limiting factor, not the skill which has already been demonstrated adequately in closed skill settings.
The use of internal cues like "make sure you point the foot" has very little carryover to performance as I've not once in my 27 million kicks thought of that during the action of kicking - I would find some form of external cue to use like that uses some form of context to what they're doing like maybe "aim to have the ball hit your laces when you kick" but even then I'd much rather try and find a constrained training drill to teach keeping the ball low during kicking, of which I have a few drills for in my arsenal.
Finally no 2 kicks are the same nailing down specific internal cures might just be a huge waste of time because in an uncontrolled seting like a game, a) you simply do not have the time to think them all through while you have the ball and b) you'll be kicking off different angles and to teammates moving in all different angles so that straight ahead lead and kick at training might look great but it's 1 kick out of a plenty that you need to master.
This could go forever so I'll leave it here but I'm open for further discussion if you want further clarification over on my socials (Facebook, Twitter).
No comments:
Post a Comment