“Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly with your mind.” ~ Knute Rockne

Sports mental preparation, physical conditioning, technical and tactical work are all important factors for sports success and reaching your full performance.

The mental preparation is one of the most ignored part of becoming a better competitor in football.

Research on sports psychology for football shows that, the only way athletes can benefit from mental training is when it is used in an organized and consistent way.

Most athletes don’t make football mental training an integral part of their preparations because they don’t actually know how to train their football minds.

They also don’t understand the importance of mental training completely. Unlike the physical and technical aspects of the sports, the benefits of mental training aren’t tangible.

Mental training is a way to improve your mental game and toughen up your football mental toughness. It makes you more resilient and thus harder to defeat.

Chants and cheers can boost motivation.

Setting goals can reduce anxiety and lay the foundation for achieving success on and off the playing field. But, building the type of brain power that influences your athletic performance goes way beyond your daily sports training.

Consistent preparation leading up to the long-term goal is the final contributor to getting the consistently great results you want.

You can create consistency in your preparations by having a clearly defined and well-practiced routine that maximizes every contributor to consistently great athletic performances.

You also need to ensure that your life and mind stay consistent.

Emotions play an immense role in the consistency of your athletic performances.

Of course, it’s okay to get excited about an event and it’s normal to feel disappointment if things don’t go your way. But too much fear, frustration, anger, or disappointment will lower your morale and football confidence and that will make it very difficult to find consistency in your daily mental training programs.

It is also the coaches’ responsibility to carve out time in their athletes’ daily schedules into which they can fit mental training such as goal setting and mental imagery. Coaches must also help mental training become a habit in practice and on game day by including mental skills tools into their feedback and reminding their athletes to use those tools in their training efforts and competition preparations.

Ultimately, just like with other aspects of your game, you have to understand how important the mind is to achieving your goals.

As it is essential to your athletic success, you must do what is necessary to weave football mental training in the very fabric of your training and competitive efforts.

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