Field Hockey Tips - How To Hit The Ball With Control, Power, and Accuracy
Pablo Mendoza and aHockeyWorld.net
It's hard to deny that field hockey is a growing sport. Most of you probably noticed the hype with the recent Rio Olympics. It's a game full of action and skill that truly resembles and incorporates aspects of many others popular sports.
Today we are lucky to sit down with our good friend and total field hockey boss, Pablo Mendoza who will be featuring this guest blog for us. Pablo is the founder of www.ahockeyworld.net which is one of the top field hockey blogs in the world with over 40,000 followers on social and several hundreds of thousand of youtube views.
Pablo has been coaching for more than 15 years helping teams and players to achieve success. He is currently engaged as one of the coaches of the Targeted Assisted Program of the International Hockey Federation, helping the Peruvian National Team while they get ready to compete at the World League 2016/17. He has coached in Argentina, Barbados, Switzerland, France, Norway, England, and the US.
If you're going to listen to anyone about hockey tips, you're going to listen to Argentinean native, Pablo Mendoza. So with no further adieu, let's get into it!
The Hit (drive) On Field Hockey
The hit or drive is one of the most complex technical skills, however with these technical details, you will master the control, power and accuracy. Many coaches and players focus only on power, but there is more that can be accomplished while hitting the ball.
- First of, there are two ways to hold the stick: choke grip (short and low) or high grip (hands on top of it).
- Both hands must go together with no space in between, this will prevent the face of the stick from flipping and rotating while giving you the proper wrist movement.
- The face of the stick must start open as we want to impact the ball on the side and not on the top of it.
- In order to manage the power of the hit, we need to regulate the way we rotate our body and how we transfer the bodyweight forward, sometimes we need to use all of our power (scoring), but sometimes we need to add more control to it (passing).
- Our head must be on top of the ball at all times, the ball must be in line or slightly in front of our left foot and our eyes must be focused on it, making sure that we impact the ball in the right angle.
Conclusion
Make sure that you get a lot of repetitions while practicing a technical skills and try to evaluate the outcome of your skills. For instance, self-evaluation is something that can be very constructive:
Why my last hit did not go on target?
Were my hands in the right position?
Why did the ball go high instead of low?
Am I rotating my body the right way?
Finally, record yourself and compare your movement with the Bownet tutorial. If you want more information, you can follow this link where you will find more material on "How to hit"
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Field Hockey Goals
Guys, we can't let you go without letting you know that Bownet makes by far the best portable field hockey goals that allow you to play anywhere and any time, setting up just 120 seconds!
