Learning to Juggle a Soccer Ball

Why Juggling?

All of the great players can juggle, Ronaldinho, George Best, Zinedine Zidane and the greatest of them all Pele.

In fact Pele used a grapefruit before he could afford a real soccer ball!

"No, I can't really remember practicing in my spare time. It's easier to remember the times I didn't practice, and most of those were when I was watching." Pele

If you can improve your juggling, you will definitely

* Improve your first touch on the ball.
* Improve your ball control
* Give you greater confidence when dribbling
* Improve your concentration
* Make you more comfortable and competent when receiving the ball
* Lets get started and get you going!


Step 1

1. Use a slightly deflated ball
2. Start juggling on a hard surface that has a nice even bounce
3. Hold the ball with both hands, arms extended at chest height
4. Drop the ball and let it bounce once
5. Before it bounces again, kick the ball back to chest height and catch it

There, you have done your first juggle, now on to bigger and better things

The sequence that you just did was called


drop-bounce-kick-catch

Keep practicing Step 1 using both feet until you can consistently kick the ball back to chest height

Step 2

You will do a similar exercise to step one, but this time the sequence is


drop-bounce-kick-bounce-kick-catch

That's right, all we have done is increase the number of kicks to 2 using the same foot

Keep practicing Step 2 until you can do it consistently.

Step 3

We are now at the stage where we should be able to repeat the


kick-bounce-kick

sequence as many times as possible. We will continue as we did in Step 1 and Step 2, but this time

Try to kick the ball to the same height that it was dropped from

Stay within a square that is 5 yards by 5 yards

Step 4

Now for something a bit more challenging

We will repeat Step 1, but this time we do not let the ball bounce, so the sequence is

drop-kick-catch

Keep practicing Step 4 using both feet until you can consistently kick the ball back to chest height

Step 5

You guessed it, Step 5 is similar to Step 4, but with an extra kick, so the sequence is


drop-kick-kick-catch

Keep practicing Step 5 using both feet until you can consistently kick the ball back to chest height

Step 6

You are now ready to do unlimited kicks, using one foot at a time,

So you just repeat the kick-kick sequence.

At this stage you should only use one foot at time. That is to say see how many you can do using only you right foot, and then see how many you can do using your left foot. Juggling Practice As well as using your feet, you should also include other parts of the body, such as the thigh and the head. When using the thigh, make sure you use the fleshy part of the thigh and NOT your knee.

You will probably find that the thigh is overused, because the thigh is an easier part of the body to juggle with

Avoid overusing the thigh, just because it easier

Use a pattern

Rather than aimlessly juggling, using patterns is a far better way to improve, so use patterns like

1. Left foot
2. Left thigh
3. Head
4. Right thigh
5. Right foot
6. Repeat 1 to 5

You can make up your own patterns. But I will stress again, it is far more beneficial to follow a pattern then to aimlessly chase a ball around, just trying to keep it in the air.

Keep up the practice and you will definitely improve.

Nigel Reed has been involved in soccer during the 60's, 70's and 80's as a player and has been coaching youth soccer in Australia since 2000.

Learn more on How to play soccer and take advantage of the Free Soccer Drills on Nigels website

Good luck with your coaching, unless you play my team of course and remember Practice Makes Permanent

© 2009 Coaching-Youth-Soccer-For-Success

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