Why Juggling a Soccer Ball?

All of the best players can juggle, Ronaldinho, George Best, Zinedine Zidane and the greatest of them all

Pele.

In fact Pele used a grapefruit before he could afford a proper soccer ball!

- Pele

If you can improve your juggling, you will certainly

Improve your first touch on the ball.

Improve your ball control

Give you greater confidence when dribbling

Improve your concentration

Make you more comfortable and competent when receiving the ball

Lets get started and get you going!

Step 1

Use a slightly flat ball

Begin juggling on a hard surface that has a good even bounce

Hold the ball with both hands, arms straight out at chest height

Drop the ball and let it bounce once

Before it bounces again, kick the ball back to chest height and catch it

There, you have done your first juggle, now on to bigger and better things

The sequence that you just did was called

drop-bounce-kick-catch

Keep practicing Step 1 using both feet until you can consistently kick the ball up to chest height

Step 2

You will do a similar exercise to step one, but this time the pattern is

drop-bounce-kick-bounce-kick-catch

That's right, all we have done is set the number of kicks to 2 using the same foot

Keep practicing Step 2 until you can do it consistently.

Step 3

We are now at the stage where we should be able to repeat the

kick-bounce-kick

sequence as many times as possible. We will continue as we did in Step 1 and Step 2, but this time

Try to kick the ball to the same height that it was dropped from

Stay within an area that is 5 yards by 5 yards

Step 4

Now for something a bit more challenging

We will repeat Step 1, but this time we do not let the ball bounce, so the sequence is

drop-kick-catch

Keep practicing Step 4 using both feet until you can consistently kick the ball back to chest height

Step 5

You guessed it, Step 5 is similar to Step 4, but with one more, so the sequence is

drop-kick-kick-catch

Keep doing Step 5 using both feet until you can consistently kick the ball back to chest height

Step 6

You are ready to do unlimited kicks, using one foot at a time, so you just keep doing the 

kick-kick sequence.

At this stage you should only use one foot at time. That is to say see how many you can do using only your right foot, and then see how many you can do using your left foot. Juggling Practice As well as using your feet, you should also include other parts of the body, such as the thigh and the head. When using the thigh, ensure you use the fleshy part of the thigh and DO NOT USE your knee.

You will probably find that the thigh is overused, as the thigh is easier to juggle with

Avoid overusing the thigh, just because it easier

Rather than aimlessly juggling, using patterns is a far better way to get better, so use patterns like

Left foot

Left thigh

Head

Right thigh

Right foot

Repeat 1 to 5

You can make up your own sequences, but I will emphasize again, it is far more beneficial to follow a pattern, that to aimlessly chase a ball around, just trying to keep it in the air.

Keep up the practice and you will definitely get better.