Practicing soccer does not require a lot of equipment. All you need is a field, a friend and a ball. However, you might not even have access to a soccer field or a friend who can join you in your training. Does that mean that you are out of options?
No you’re not. There are many soccer skills that can be developed in your bedroom or in any other room in your house that does not contain things that could easily break on impact
Here’s a list of the soccer skills that you can practice inside your home.
1- Juggling the soccer ball.
The only thing that you need to practice juggling is a ball and enough patience. Pick a room in your house that does not contain any easily breakable objects and start juggling the ball.
If you are a beginner, then try to keep the ball as low as possible. This way, when you lose control over the ball, you’ll still won’t do a lot of damage around you in case there are things that can break from the impact of the ball.
As mentioned in many of the previous articles on this blog, juggling is an excellent skill to have because it helps you keep control over the ball during a soccer match.
2- Performing an accurate direct pass
Being very accurate in your direct passes is very important during any soccer match. You definitely don’t want your opponents to win a counter attack because you didn’t pass the ball correctly to your teammate.
In order to practice your direct passes, you can place a target on your room’s floor and then you can try and hit that target using a direct pass.
If you are already good at doing a direct pass, then you should make things more challenging. You can place obstacles that are very close to the straight line passing through the ball and the target.
This way, you’ll have to be 100% accurate in order to hit your target without hitting any other obstacles during the process.
3- Heading a soccer ball.
In every soccer match, you will have to head the soccer ball at least once during the game. For that reason, practicing headers is always a good thing to do.
All you need in order to practice headers inside your home is a wall and a ball.
Start by throwing the ball above your head, then hitting the ball with your forehead towards the wall.
You can also put some targets on your wall (a sticky note maybe) and aim at them when you hit the ball with your forehead. This will make things much harder for you, but it will also make you much more accurate when you perform a header in soccer.
Learn more about how to do soccer headers in this article.
4- Accuracy in kicking the soccer ball to the air.
Kicking a soccer ball in the air is one of the fundamental skills that every soccer player needs to master.
You can improve your accuracy in your room. Get a bucket, place it close to you, and try to land the ball inside the bucket with one kick. Once you do that, move the bucket to a further distance and try again.
This very simple activity will improve your ability to accurately kick the ball in the air, and you’ll improve the way you make contact with the ball when you want to kick it in general.
5- Receiving a soccer ball like a pro
When one of your teammates passes the ball towards you, you need to know how to receive it while keeping control over the ball. You can practice receiving the soccer ball in your home using any wall.
Kick the ball in the air towards the wall. Once the ball bounces back, try and receive the ball with the body part that is closest to the ball.
Do not always kick the ball straight towards the wall. Try and kick it slightly to the left or to the right so that you’ll have to move left or right when you try to receive it.
If you hit the ball very high towards the wall, and it bounces back, then you’ll have to jump and receive the ball with your head or shoulder.
If the ball doesn’t bounce back from the wall very high, then try to receive the ball with your knee or foot.
The most important part is that you make sure the ball does not bounce back again when you try to receive it.
When the ball is coming towards you, you need to try and decrease it’s velocity to zero in order to be able to land it in front of you, or else it will just bounce back after it hits your body and any of your opponent’s players will be able to very easily steal the ball from you.
6- Running for long distances.
You’ll have to run a lot when you’re playing soccer. For that reason, the more you can survive running without feeling extremely exhausted, the better.
While running in your place doesn’t have the exact same benefits of the regular running, it still offers you similar benefits according to this health line article.
So running in place at home is a great exercise.
Just stand up in any room inside your home and start running and jumping in your place. Take breaks between each run/jump and push yourself to run or jump more in every next training period.
With that said, I’ll end my list of the soccer skills that you can learn at home.
The skills listed above cover the most essential soccer skills that you need to learn in order to get started with soccer, so all you need to do if you want to start playing soccer is to practice a little bit inside your house in order to master the basics and then go show the world your talent.