If you have spent some time watching the A-League this year you will have witnessed an abundance of shots on goal that should have been buried in the back of the net, but instead have gone sailing over the crossbar, pushed wide of the post or hit straight at the keeper. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand why players at the elite level, with thousands of hours training under their belts, manage to miss some of the easiest opportunities.
If you watch the replays carefully, sometimes you can almost see the exact moment when the player starts to….think! Most of us have had it drummed into us since a young age to “think about it” and the rise of the information age, knowledge economy and the high value put on intellect hasn’t helped. Don’t get me wrong – these things are incredibly important – just rarely on the football pitch.
The human mind can be broadly divided into two main components – the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is primarily responsible for directing our focus and reasoning – it represents approximately 10% of our mind’s overall activity.
The subconscious mind represents the remaining 90% of our mind and in its simplest form can be described as a large storehouse of all our memories, things we have learned, habits and beliefs. There is a very important reason for this division. The human mind takes in approximately two million bits of data (visual, auditory, smell, touch etc.) every second, with only seven or eight bits of that data being recognised by the conscious mind. Our minds work this way to avoid us becoming overwhelmed – can you imagine having to consciously process two million bits of data every second?
The second reason (and the one of most relevance to football) the human mind works this way is for efficiency. Every time you learn to do something your mind files it away. The more you practise that thing, the stronger the neural pathways become. This frees up your conscious mind to focus on other things while your subconscious mind triggers the appropriate response. A perfect example of this is when you, as a youngster, learned to walk. After practice, how to walk was wired into your brain so you no longer needed to think about how to do it.
This is why it’s incredibly important to learn and practise correct technique in every training session. The more you practise correct technique the more efficiently and effectively the technique becomes wired into your brain. Once you have wired in the correct technique, you then need to learn to trust your training. In game situations you need to learn how to quiet your conscious mind so your subconscious mind can unleash its magic with that great strike, perfect pass or sublimely timed tackle – just as you practised. Invariably, if you are thinking about what you are going to do, you are going to make a mistake. This is because while you have your conscious mind involved in the process of striking the ball or passing, for example, you are blocking the subconscious mind from taking over and triggering your body to execute what it already knows how to do.
In a future article I’ll discuss some techniques you can use to stop ‘thinking’ on the football field and let your subconscious mind take your game to the next level.
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