Last week I took it upon myself to film clips for an instructional video on change of direction and lateral speed work. With a background in soccer, I understand the importance of the development and patterning of these two components of movement. Not only do they play a crucial role in performance testing (did I hear someone say “beep test”?) but they also play an important role when it comes time to compete. As a quick transition sport, soccer especially requires tight and efficient changes in direction. Being efficient requires patterning and patterning requires practice.
Through my time this summer working with the women’s soccer and hockey teams at Northeastern I have gotten the opportunity to observe, coach and personally put myself through a progression of movements intended to begin this patterning of efficient change of direction.
This progression begins with the “line punch”, a slight shift of the lower body to one side while maintaining the original position of the torso, loading the inside leg and creating an inside lean. This “punch” is the base camp of change of direction movements. It is an elementary, isolated movement that is patterned with the intention of incorporating it into every shuttle conditioning session moving forward. The second movement in the progression is learning how to push. “Push! Don’t reach” is a common cue during these training sessions. The goal is for the athlete to push laterally using their back leg (pushing through full extension of the knee). The ability to produce power from this type of pushing far exceeds the natural tendency to reach and pull with the front leg. The third movement we stress with the athletes is developing the crossover. The crossover involves pushing the ground away with the front leg as the knee of the back leg flexes and steps laterally. An important thing to stress while coaching the crossover is that the pushing/fully extending front leg is doing all the work. The back leg is just along for the ride, landing where it naturally falls.
Sleds or bands can be helpful tools in the patterning of these lateral, change of direction movements. The effort required to work against the resistance cues the muscles in and gives the athlete the ability to feel which muscles should be firing once the resistance is taken away.
Once the three basic movements (line punch, push and crossover) are taught, practice and patterning at least two times a week can help the athletes to maintain and improve their change of direction efficiency. Once the movements become fluid, more emphasis can be given on achieving length and covering more ground. Simple line punches, pushes and crossovers can be combined together to form more complex and continuous movements that closely simulate competition situations.
While the video has yet to be edited or compiled into a finished work, the process of breaking down the movements for this project has proved to be a valuable experience that has given me the confidence to feel comfortable both writing about and coaching an athlete how to transition and change direction more efficiently.