Wall Training
The best way to improve your skills is with a WALL. Period.
If you read through biographies of some of the greatest soccer players of the last twenty years, Mia Hamm, Dennis Bergkamp, Claudio Reyna, they will all tell you about the vital importance training with a wall played in their individual development.
Quite simply, the wall is the ultimate training tool. There is no better mechanism to maximize repetition and to build the muscle-memory necessary to master key skills. You can train for EVERY SINGLE skill you need as a soccer player using a wall.
The wall is for everybody, from U6 players to the top professional players. To truly make progress as a player and to become better than your teammates, you need to do something extra. All players attend their team practices, but you need to do something more, and there is no better tool that will provide you that something more than a wall. If you can learn how to train with a wall, and you dedicate yourself to it, you will improve your game by leaps and bounds.
The beautiful thing about a wall is that all you need is yourself, one ball, and a wall, and you can do anything!
The wall is:
Perfect training partner
You don’t need a private coach to help you improve because the wall is the perfect partner. When I was growing up it was very hard to find somebody to kick a ball with me in the backyard. The wall will play with you whenever you want, and you can play with a wall for hours, it never tires.
The best player in the world
The Wall never makes a mistake. If you give a perfect pass to the wall, you will get a perfect pass back, if you give a poor pass, you will get a poor pass back. The wall never lies. If you can execute a particular wall exercise correctly, you will be able to develop a rhythm, being able to get 5, 10, 15, in a row… if you can’t develop a rhythm, the wall is telling you that particular exercise/skill is not good enough, yet!
Found everywhere
I promise you there is a good wall somewhere in every town in Massachusetts (if you can’t find one email me, I bet you I know of one). The key to a good wall is one that is perfectly perpendicular to the ground. A wall having a 90 degree angle with the ground is not a must, but it will allow you to practice passing exercises in addition to all other exercises.
Common places where good walls are located include metal rebound walls at public tennis courts, sides of school gymnasiums, and in your basement.
An intense training tool
If you rounded up the 4 balls you have in your closet, and brought them to the goal at the nearby park to practice shooting, how many shots do you think you would take in an hour? My guess is between all the time spent retrieving the balls from the back of the goal (or the woods), you would get 100-150 shots of practice. If you brought 1 ball to a wall, you would shoot the ball over 1000 times in that same hour. That is 10 times the workout – that is training smart. In today’s day and age, time is so limited you need to train smart.
Can train every single skill
There is not a skill you cannot develop and practice using a wall. There are over 100 wall exercises I have come up with. To be a good soccer player you need to have total control of every part of your body except your hands, which requires incredible soccer coordination. By going through the 100+ wall exercises you will begin using parts of the body to play and control the ball that you probably have never used.
For everyone
While infants may not be able to perform every wall exercise, by the time they are toddlers they will. All kidding aside, as soon as a player starts kicking the ball there are exercises they can use a wall for, and as players start to develop their skills and coordination, the array of exercises will increase very rapidly. For very advanced players, the wall can help fine-tune key technical skills. There are several professional players who I train daily in the offseason with a wall, getting not only a great workout but maintaining the rhythm and level of their skills.
A metric provider
Soccer is not a sport that has many metrics. There are really just goals and assists. Other sports like basketball have tons of statistics; points, assists, steals, defensive rebound, offensive rebounds, 3-pt shots, blocks, etc. In soccer, outside of possibly forwards who can compare goals from season to season, there are no real metrics to gauge your progress over time. The wall provides a metric using the Road To Wall Mastery Chart. As you make progress on the wall exercises, you can record your development. This development will directly translate onto the field in your game.
Read over our player development philosophies here, and you will quickly see how wall training “maximizes your two minutes.”