“Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.” Knute Rockne

The legendary Knute Rockne, 4-time national champion for the University of Notre Dame ‘Fighting Irish’ college football team , sums up a time-tested adage about football:

A well-tuned football mind is one teeming with football confidence and the required mental toughness that works in tandem with the physicality of the sport to achieve on-field success.

Football psychology is as much a part of the ever-changing game today as the muscle and brawn that defined its early years, and the psychology for football can be cultivated with the same discipline needed to add on the muscle necessary to compete.

Through dedicated practice, mental discipline, and constant improvement the tactics behind the psychology in football today can be used to elevate your game from the practice field to the lights of primetime.

Here are a few tips to sharpen the mental game of football:

Set realistic, attainable goals for practice, and stick to a routine that has proven success.

The wealth of experiences that paint the mental game of football for you are derived from your practices and the routines you set during them. Allow yourself to set achievable goals, and goals that are met time after time. Like the weights you lift, with each successful football practice where all of your goals are met you will naturally be strengthening your football mental toughness. Vary your routine, sharpen the footwork involved, the routes you run, agility training exercises completed, and maximize all the fundamentals of practice and training. In time you will master them, leading to finding your own mental game in football, and mastery of the football fundamentals breeds football confidence.

Focus on what you can control: Actualize your success

Football psychologists would agree that confidence is the precursor to success – the entire mental game played in football demands it of true champions. After mastery of your own physical skills and fundamentals, the task of actualizing your success will determine the outcome of winning the one-on-ones, the adversarial sports psychology in football. A player that sees their own routines paying off in practice need only the discipline of actualizing their potential and using mental preparation football habits to carry that success over to game time. This is the difference between a successful practice player and a winning game-changer.

Be resilient, repeat

Football psychology articles today undermine the mental preparation in football by highlighting the hazards of a physical game. Hits can be bruising, but underestimating the mental toughness earned in the discipline of football can be game-changing; fundamental miscues can be the difference between winning and losing in a game decided by inches. A bad pursuit angle can mean a touchdown, and a missed tackle can be an explosive gain. The final step is resilience in the face of defeat, and learning to use that knowledge to sharpen and fine-tune your football mental game going forward.

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