‼️ PLAYING FOOTBALL DURING PERSONAL DIFFICULTIES⁉️
By “The Goalkeeper Psychology Consultant”
From my own experiences I can confirm that personal issues are an inevitable part of every athletes career 😞
Problems with work, school, relationships, friends, family or ev... 1/3
yourself are unfortunately just part of life 🤷♂️
H O W E V E R, studies have shown that when these issues are not dealt with properly there is usually a major negative impact on a players on-field performance 😱😱😱
⬇️ Focus & Attention
⬆️ Errors & Injury Risk
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Unfortunately football is still a bit behind other sports in terms of how it handles players personal life difficulties 🙄
Thankfully my work with athletes from other sports helped me to discover the following top tips
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It has been shown that on average elite level GKs typically perform 4-10 ‘defensive actions’ per game, all at high intensity.
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These actions are very short in duration, often with long intervals in between them. Therefore, whist physical fatigue may not be the issue for GKs during match-play, the ability to concentrate and focus for those prolonged periods, may be the deciding factor.
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In my previous post I highlighted that research indicates that GKs energy expenditure was approximately 600 kcal.d-1 less than that observed in outfield players, for example, approximately 2900 kcal vs 3500 kcal per day.
GKs don’t hop to set. They hop to self organise their body to dive.
You see a “mistake” and look at twitter you’ll find countless theories regarding why that GK conceded which always leads to a technical / physical error.
But your body will only produce an action as a reaction to what it perceives.
Is the chosen action wrong because of what the brain is telling them to do as opposed to their body “unable to do something” due to set up?
Set up changes according to situation / what you perceive.
So how do people differentiate between anatomical and mental “issues”?
Remember this is just thoughts! But hopefully this thread can give others something else to think about before jumping to a physical fix.