INHIBITION
In my last blog I opened up about my personal struggle throughout this season and some techniques I use to cope which include talking to those who are close to you and have your best interest at heart, getting objective feedback from those who can help you with the topic at hand, and being aware of your emotions to ensure you maintain an objective outlook on the situation. I am very happy to share that we finally achieved that elusive win, after 11 failed attempts now we have won 2 out of 3!
This time I will shift the focus from personal development to cognitive development. These are the two areas in which I have divided “mental training” in football. In this blog and upcoming posts, I will share experiences and knowledge that are practically useful for the reader in both arenas. Some topics that we will visit addressing personal development include handling adversity or stress, communication skills, leadership, and motivation. These are skills necessary to cope with the demands of high performance on and off the pitch. As you may recall, I am a firm believer that high performance in sports, football in my case, require many of the same mental and social skills to live a high-performance life.
Cognitive development refers to the specific processes that happen while playing football. We will focus on cognitive flexibility, concentration, perception, working memory, reaction, and inhibition. Masters of these skills can handle the fast pace and ever-changing game of football. Our goal is to define each of these concepts and help the reader understand their application in football, as well as some possible ways to train each of these skills. Today’s focus will be on Inhibition.
In this context we can define inhibition as the mental process of restraining an action. In other words, your ability to stop an action once you have started it. A typical example can be a striker that has decided to shoot but in the moment of contact with the ball, a defender slides in front to block the shot. Now the striker stops the shooting action and makes another decision. That action of stopping the shot is inhibition. Other examples of inhibition in a football context are:
– Goal keepers deciding whether to come out or stay in the line, stopping the urge to do either depending on new information gathered within milliseconds
– A winger making a run behind the back line, but adjusting after seeing the line is pushing an offside trap
– Stopping the action of taking a short corner when realizing the opposition has sent an extra defender to deal with the situation
It is likely that you already are working on inhibition in your training sessions without being aware of it. However, now that you know the definition and what it looks like in football, you are much better equipped to train and develop this skill. Doing so requires focus and awareness. Rondos have many moments of inhibition, or, in reaction games, where the coach makes you sprint a short distance to the right or left depending on the instructions. Again, being more aware means that you can purposely train your neurological pathways to fire, and inhibit, more effectively.
In the attached videos (2) you will find a passing exercise which has inhibition components. It is a quite simple pattern that four players are involved which ends in a player shooting towards two mini goals that are protected by a defender. The defender is asked to pick a side before the attacking player has shot. He is also encouraged to sometimes challenge the shooter by changing goals quickly before he has shot. This is designed to test the inhibition capability of the player with the ball. The player with the ball must then orientate to see where the defender stands and make sure that he is ready to stop the action of shooting if the defender switches goals suddenly.
In the first video we show a player “failing” to inhibit effectively, thus trying to score in the goal that was blocked. In the second video you can see an example of a player realizing the goal is blocked and quickly stopping his decision to pass (you can see him hoping on his planted foot), and deciding to pass to the opposite goal.
I hope there was some information of use and don’t hesitate to visit our Services page to see how we can actively help you train inhibition and the other cognitive skills to bring your game to the next level!
