Football dribbling drills are essential for any soccer or GAA player. At Douglas Forest and Garden, we provide football equipment to help you perfect dribbling, passing, striking and other critical techniques to up your game and get more out of your sport.
Learning to use less force when dribbling
To up your game using these exercises, you will need a ball and a set of football marker cones. One of the most common issues for players is they use too much power when controlling the football. Here is a drill that can help you get a feel for the right amount of power to use. For these drills, you’ll need to place a series of cones in a line about half a metre apart and place about fifteen in a row. The aim is to dribble the ball between the cones using as many tight, small controlled movements as you can.
Ensure that your touches only move the ball a few inches at a time, so that you’re just tapping it with about three touches to travel is between the two cones. What you’re learning to do is to stop pushing the ball too far, which causes you to overcompensate, lose your centre of balance and ultimately lose control of the ball. Small, controlled touches are the way to do this.
You can try to take it between five cones using just one foot, then try dribble through then following five using the other.
Football Dribbling Drills: Speed Dribbling
Place two rows of cones. Have one row about two metres from the other to create a “lane”, and in each row have each cone about 1.5 metres apart. The aim here is to dribble the ball between the cones as fast as you can while maintaining control of the ball between each cone. This isn’t about focusing on touches and control, but instead on speed. You should aim to be taking about two steps for every touch of the ball that you make. Practice springing down this lane while controlling the ball with the left leg, then come back and sprint again this time controlling the ball with your right leg.
Controlled Speed Dribbling
Keeping the same setup as the last exercise, this time you go at about 70-80% of your full speed and rather than trying to go as fast as possible, aim to make one touch of the ball with every second step. This involves using less force as in the second exercise so that every second step brings you to the ball so you can tap it with the same foot. Practice this drill once with your right foot and then again with your left foot. This skill can give you the ability to perform fakeouts as you take a shot at goals.
If you’d like more information on our soccer equipment, call us today on tel:021 4965 132