These football tips will help you how to think fast in football. Being fast in football means being ahead of your opponent. Fast players think quickly, act quickly, and move quickly with and without the ball.
The best players have three to four options on each play. Knowing those options before receiving the ball is an advantage. Before receiving a pass, check your shoulders to see if a defender is closing in on you. You can shoot where your open teammates are, where the space is, or if the goalie is out.
Important Points:
1. As you check to the ball, angle your body. Turn to the side to see more of the field. Stand like this if the ball is with the fullback. This is not it.
2. Check your shoulder facing your defensive third and look around you before your teammate makes a pass. Don’t turn your head in a circle; turn your head as you normally would.
3. Check your shoulder as the ball approaches your attacking third. This should be a broad view of the entire field. Make an effort to look up rather than down.
4. Check your shoulders before the ball is directly on top. Do it earlier in the game so you can look at the ball again before it lands at your feet. Even the best players must watch the ball when it is time to control it.
Below are the key factors to help you how to think fast in football.
Focus on your Health & Nutrition
Anyone who wants to learn how to get faster and faster for football must keep their health in check. Aside from physical fitness and regular practice, maintaining a balanced diet can help you achieve good body health (which translates to keeping a healthy diet).
Some coaches say eating a carbohydrate-rich snack before training sessions can boost energy.
Pay attention to your agility and flexibility
Body flexibility and agility go hand in hand with speed. If you pay attention to your body’s flexibility and strive to keep it, you can better coordinate your body to achieve more efficient sprinting. Flexibility will also assist you in maintaining the required body postures, which call for the upper body to be slightly bent and your hands to be on your sides at all times. You can move quickly with the ball by balancing your toes and taking longer steps while running.
Improved Your Speed of Perception
This is your ability to make sense of the game as it unfolds on the field with all the moving parts. A fast perceptual player can observe and hear what is happening around them and process it quickly.
Playing with players of different skill levels can help you improve your perceptual speed. It’s sometimes beneficial to play with players who are more advanced than you and think faster, as this will stretch your capabilities. It’s also beneficial to play with less experienced players so you can notice things when the game is a little slower.
Enhance Your Anticipation Speed
Your ability to predict what will happen is even more important than running fast on the field. If you instinctively know where to be and when, you can always arrive before your opponent, whether you run faster than them.
How to improve Anticipation Speed: Reviewing game tape of yourself and your team playing is a great way to think fast in football. Every play you encounter on the field or watch afterward is subconsciously stored in your memory. The more you have played and seen, the more you will be able to recognize cues as similar situations unfold.
Enhance Your Speed of Decision-Making
When you have the ball, your decision-making speed is the same as when you don’t. It entails planning one or two moves ahead of time while also being able to assess and change your mind in the heat of battle.
How to improve it: The more technically sound you are, your decisions will be. The more at ease and confidence you are on the ball, the less you will have to think about what to do when it arrives, and the more you can concentrate on quick decisions.
Improve Your Reaction Time
Because there are so many moving parts in a football game, predicting or anticipating everything that will occur is impossible. So much of what you do on the field reacts to other events, such as how the ball travels, whether it deflects, what your teammates do, what your opponent does, and so on. The faster you respond, the better.
How to Improve: Using a wall as a training partner is a great way to improve your reaction speed. You can train your body to adjust to unexpected bumps and bounces and get creative to train reactions to various visual and auditory cues.
Enhance Your Movement Speed
This is called “speed” — your ability to run from point A to point B, with or without the ball. This is critical! However, as you can see, only one component can make you fast.
How to improve it: To improve your movement speed, you must train/run as fast as possible while recovering fully. When practicing your movement speed, try not to get tired.
Study The Ball’s Speed
This tip will help you understand the ball’s motion quickly. How quickly can you dribble, turn, receive, pass, or shoot?
How to improve it: The more you practice the various techniques, the faster and cleaner you can perform them when it counts. Work on your speed as you get more comfortable with different football dribbling drills.
Work On Your Speed of Play
You have probably heard this term a lot. The ability to combine all other types of speed on the field is called speed of play. To play quickly, you must be able to move, think, and act quickly in all areas. Your ability to increase the pace of your team’s game, both on and off the ball, is your speed of play.
How to Improve: Watching football can help you improve your playing speed and how to think fast in football. Furthermore, the more you improve the types of speed listed above, the faster you can play as a whole.
Bonus Tips!
Train these tips and other speed-of-play exercises regularly to think fast in football. Make checking your shoulders a habit, and you will notice a significant improvement in your level of play. Most importantly, as you work hard to improve and train, remember to give your body and mind time to rest.
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