OpportunityElite magazine, Off-season training by OpportunityElite

OFF-SEASON TRAINING DEVELOP YOUR GAME THIS SUMMER

TRAINING IN THE OFF-

BUILDING, AND KEEPING

TRAINING DRILLS &

SEASON

CONFIDENCE

PRACTICES

How to keep improving while there's no training or games

Â Sports Pyschotherapist, Trevor Gray, gives us insight into confidence and how to turn it into a valuable weapon

See this months latest drills and practice releases

Contents

Page 3 - Introduction Page 5 - Latest practices and drills Pages 6-8 - Training in the off-season Page 9 - Join the Ball Mastery Elite Page 10 - 14 - Building your Confidence with Trevor Gray Page 15 - The Maradona 7 Page 16 - Follow us on Social Media

KEEP UP IN.......

YOUR

TRAINING

THE OFFSEASON by OpportunityElite owner, Elliott Everson

Thanks for joining us for May's edition of our player development magazine. Our focus this month is helping you carry on your training during the period of the year where you may not have many opportunities to play organised football. The season is nearing its end and it's likely that it may be a few months until you train or play again competitively. Our aim is to assist you in these quiet months, helping you continue your training and enhance the progress that you have made throughout the season. We hope you enjoy this month's edition and please feel free to share it with any players, coaches, or contacts, who would love to keep up their progression over the Summer months.

PRACTICE MAKES PERMANENT Elliott Everson, OpportunityElite

OUR LATEST DRILLS & PRACTICES Keep up your practices over theÂ Summer months with these latest drills released by us here at OpportunityElite. The more touches on the ball you take, the better you will become. Click below to view the videos. Improve your First Touch by clicking here....... Close Control Skills to improve your touch here......

TRAINING IN THE OFFSEASON It's coming to the end of the season and you may have only a few games to play. Some teams have already finished and are on their Summer break. We aim to help you with your training throughout the Summer, getting you in a position to be flying for the new season. The weekends may seem quieter and Sunday can feel a long day without a match to play in. It can almost feel like an eternity until the season starts back up again, but you can keep training, giving yourself a chance to be fit and ready for the new season. Training over the off-season can be hard, at times players can think, "What am I training for?" The answer to that is to improve your game, helping you reach new levels of performance. During this period you aren't conditioning your body to be match fit. The main focus should be to work on your technical skills. The off-season can last for two to three months. It is a long time but don't worry about high intensity fitness training over the first month, focus purely on the ball.

You will see great improvements in your game if you focus on the ball, giving you great development time. Work on practising your weaker foot, passing, dribbling, and close control. You will begin to see fantastic progression in your game. It's common for players to focus on the physical side of their game over the Summer months. This is incredibly important, however you should use that energy focusing on the ball. Short and sharp, intense workouts with the ball will actually provide you with great fitness. The intense training with the ball will tick all the boxes for you, developing your technique and confidence on the ball, as well as your fitness. I used to find that I was most tired late on in a game when I had the ball at my feet, not when I had to make a 60 yard sprint back into a defensive position with three minutes remaining. Keeping your technique when tired is vital.

Training on the ball with high intensity will give you the fitness and sharpness that will be needed in pre-season. There will come a time in the off-season where you do need to focus more on the physical side of the game, preparing yourself for the challenges that lay ahead. It is vitally important that you don't begin your fitness training a week before pre-season; start it a month to a month-and-a-half ahead and really ramp up your preparations. At the same time as this keep practising on the ball. You should aim to be as fit and as technically sound as ever. Imagine that your season finished today and you had three months until your next game. How should you train and at what stage should you shift your focus from the technical to the more physical training? The answer to that will depend on the player.

EVERY INDIVIDUAL IS UNIQUE. SOME PLAYERS WILL NEED TO FOCUS MORE ON THE PHYSICAL, RATHER THAN TECHNICAL, TRAINING. We've all come across players who are physically naturally-gifted, possessing the ability to run for what seems like an eternity. There are then others who need to work hard on their fitness. Each player knows their body the best but we would recommend variation in your training.

Use the off-season as a fantastic opportunity to develop your technical game. Take a bag of balls up to the local park or playing fields and keep working hard. Your game will develop hugely over this period if you continue to put in the work and train intensely. Use this period to reach the next level of your game.

Over the Summer months focus on yourself as a player: can you work hard and take your game to the next level? As time progresses you will need to build in the physical aspects of your training with high intensity drills that develop fitness, balance, co-ordination and stamina.

While training technically, aim to include some fitness work: short and sharp burst of speed, with small recovery time. This will give you a chance to remain sharp in preparation for the new season.

Don't think it has to be one or the other, you can include a ball in your fitness training. High intensity dribbles and changes of direction provide fantastic match-like scenarios that can give you a rigorous work-out.

As time progresses you can include more physical training with your ball work. Take it up another level and make sure that you are now working on your fitness more than before. If you remain dedicated, motivated and enthusiastic about your work in the off-season then the season will come around quickly. Prepare to succeed in your game and hit the ground running for the new season.

EXPEDITION | PAGE 2

Start your technical training this off-season in the best way possible: focusing on getting you more touches on the ball and progressing your ball mastery training throughout this practice. The more touches on the ball the better. Begin your training with OpportunityElite.Â

CONFIDENCE: ‘YOUR PERCEPTION OF YOUR ABILITY AT A GIVEN TIME TO CARRY OUT A TASK’.

INTRODUCING TREVOR GRAY, OUR SPORTS PSYCHOTHERAPIST Qualified Sports Psychotherapist, Trevor Gray, joins us to provide insight and knowledge to help you reach the next level of your game. With experience as a top 10 recording artist with his band, Apollo 440, and former Fulham FC coach, Trevor can help us all make sure the mental side of our game is operating to the same levels as our feet. Trevor is currently working with academy players across the Premier and Football Leagues, and in sports as diverse as cricket, showjumping and fencing.Â He is currently the Director of Performance Psychology at Ultimate Athlete, and sees players one-to-one at his private practice in London and Tunbridge Wells. Trevor is passionate about helping players reach their potential, and providing information to help you develop your game, off the pitch. This month Trevor will be discussing confidence in your game.

BUILDING AND MAINTAINING CONFIDENCE. If only we could bottle confidence and use it for when we need it most. It might be the game against your local rivals or the cup final that is upcoming. That feeling of being confident can lead you to new heights, but it is rare that it lasts for a prolonged period of time. Once the confidence diminishes it can be hard to get it back, potentially leaving you with a lack of belief in your ability. We sat down with Trevor to speak about his experiences in the recording industry, performing in front of 100,000's of thousands of fans, his time coaching at Fulham FC and his role as a Sports psychotherapist to academy level footballers. Knowing how to improve your confidence and maintain it is something every footballer wants to know. Fortunately, we have Trevor who can inform us of the tools to succeed in the mental area of the sport. Trevor's knowledge is immense and he has experienced the top level in music, and football. He knows how to perform to an audience and can pass on his knowledge each day to aspiring footballers, and performers.

Turn to the next page to see how to build and maintain your confidence......

Can you improve confidence?

Confidence can briefly be defined as ‘your perception of your ability at a given time to carry out a task’. So your confidence can go up and down depending on how you feel from one moment to the next. We all know the feeling of being more confident after our team scores a goal, or less confident if we concede. So if confidence can be affected by our moods or our perception of circumstances which are changing, it’s hard to keep a stable state of mind. That’s where mental conditioning training comes in. If we can keep our performance more constant, that is we can keep our performances less affected by moods or circumstances, we will have more consistent results. You can’t just tell someone to ‘be more confident’ and expect it to happen by magic - although often confidence feels like it is hard to grasp and hold on to. At Ultimate Athlete we work on our ‘Seven C’s’ programme - looking at Commitment, Communication, Concentration, Competition, Control, Consistency and finally Confidence. As we have seen above, our confidence depends on how well we commit, communicate, concentrate, compete, control ourselves and are consistent in our sport - these all help us to perform at a more stable and dependable level. All these elements can be worked on separately and give us the confidence we need to perform at our best. I try and get players to look at how they can improve these areas, and less on whether they are winning matches - because being a winner doesn’t make you a competitor, but being a consistent competitor will eventually make you a winner. If a player is having a bad patch of form and consequently lacking in confidence, I would help the player look at which of the Seven C’s is suffering and which area he/she can work on. Then we can focus on a programme of improvement and positive reinforcement, encouraging the player where he is getting stronger so that he is able to play well in the game.

Maintaining confidence over a prolonged period of time. Maintaining confidence for a more prolonged period of time, rather than hoping you have it from game to game, is about establishing the ‘constant self’ of working on all Seven C’s, so that performance is always reviewed and areas of improvement recognised and worked on. I like the cycle of ‘performance, then review, then practise, then rehearsal, then back to performance’.

Can you be over-confident? Over-confidence is down to a lack of preparation - which means practise and rehearsal - we think we can easily do a task or win a game. If we don’t prepare properly and keep up our skill levels then how can we perform at our best? This leads to a lack of commitment, concentration, competing level, control and consistency - not surprising then that we’re heading for a fall of over-confidence. In future editions of OpportunityElite magazine, we will look at each of the Seven C’s in turn and highlight ways in which you can improve your performance and hence become more confident.

Further Questions

If you would like to discuss subjects such as these further with Trevor then please feel free to contact him using the details below: M: 07970 440441 E:trevor@trevorgraytherapy.co.uk Skype sessions also available

www.trevorgraytherapy.co.uk

THE MARADONA 7 Close Control Skills

Give this skill practice a go. Focus on getting your touch and control on different areas of your body with this challenging and exciting practiceÂ

Click here for the Maradona 7 skill practice

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