In this instructional video, the narrator (a 42‑year‑old former athlete) demonstrates a series of soccer‑ball skill drills and explains how systematic, creative daily practice can rapidly improve coordination, hip mobility, and overall athletic performance. He starts with alternating‑foot juggling, progressing from a few repetitions to hundreds, then moves to wall passes, off‑the‑ground bounces, single‑touch and square‑pass drills, and bouncy‑ball work that challenges off‑ground control. He introduces knee‑lift and hip‑flexor conditioning inspired by sprinter mechanics, showing how ATG variations and cable pulls translate to faster leg lifts and better high‑ball kicks. Throughout, he emphasizes a “new athlete” mindset: habit‑forming, incremental 1% gains, creative exploration of every possible ball contact (hip, sole, behind‑the‑back), and the mental rewiring that comes from daily skill work. He argues these skills transfer to other sports (kickboxing, rugby, tennis) and to broader life performance, positioning the routine as a superior alternative to generic conditioning like CrossFit. The video blends practical demonstration with motivational coaching, referencing expert Wolfgang Schulhorn and using personal anecdotes to illustrate rapid improvement despite age.
Chapters
Just like we vary the surfaces with our handstands to improve our handstands faster, varying the balls with football is going to improve our ability faster. Whether we call football or soccer, we'll start with just some juggling on our own. At 30, I could barely get five kick ups in a row. Now my record is 400, strictly alternating between left and right. That was just recently and it was going up from 100 to 200 to 400. I think it's reasonable to consider that it might become 500, 1000. But these boring kick ups are only going to take you so far. Kicking off the wall is one of the best tools for actually making you a better player. You can go single touches, you can pass it across. Off the camera, you can go single touches, pass it across. Another nice one is off the square. Just started working on this one. It's not very smooth yet. It's trickier than it looks to get the nice pass and the first touch. It's coming along. Also the bouncy ball. What I found is a lot of guys who've even played a lot of soccer come back in who played a lot of soccer, they still, they struggle with the bouncing ball. As soon as the ball's not flat on the ground, they can't kick it. This was something in hockey as well, where I really struggled if the ball was off the ground. Playing field hockey, a soccer ball is super easy to deal with off the ground. Such a big target, so something that you can improve then. Another area that I've seen a lot of players haven't done any work on is bouncing the ball down. And yeah, bouncing the ball down isn't. Isn't specific. It's more like basketball. It's not specific to the game. But the more general skills you have with the ball, the further you're likely to go as a player. So you get your single bounces like this, and then. Alternating every touch makes you run on the spot. Another one is the knees. Running knees. Running knees is a good challenge. First step is to get the knees. You can play with single touches, double touches, but then we want to get that same running pattern like we have with the bouncers. Six, Five, 12. For sprinters, hip flexors tend to be much stronger than in other athletes. They're able to lift the leg really fast. Now you can train that ability to lift the leg fast with things like the ATG variations, pulling the knees to the chest with a cable. But most sprinters haven't built that ability in that way. They've built the Ability to pull the knees to the chest fast. By pulling the knees to the chest fast, I can notice a big difference since doing more soccer ball juggling with how much stronger and more mobile I feel in the hips. Especially like the active mobility in the shorter ranges. So this is also then going to help to be able to kick balls that are up higher because the femur has to go there for the foot to get there. So it builds our foundation also for that. See if I can beat that. 12, 4, 11. Yeah. See that? Like finding your way around. It's not about soccer. I don't see myself getting a call from Chelsea anytime soon. But I'm building a base of coordinating my body that I didn't have before. It makes me feel better for everything if I'm gonna go. If I was gonna get into some kickboxing, I'd be better prepared for that. Kickboxing with having this foundation, it all connects. It all plays together. Most soccer players have big gaps in what they can do with the ball. Most other athletes are completely disconnected from their feet and hitting a target or not. If they're not completely disconnected, there's just massive room for improvement. We keep taking that massive room for improvement. So we can get five times better objectively with a soccer ball. That might carry over to 1% better as a rugby player. But all you're looking for is those 1% improvements. It's cliche, but it's true. And the cool thing about this is that it's fun. It's bring up general conditioning. And you can do lots of work on this in season, off season. There's really no excuse to not be doing skills work in the way that we do it in new athlete. It can be done all year round. We're just looking for those fractions. Sport is made up of those fractions. Life is made up of those fractions. 52 sweats pouring off me. Would I be better to go for a jog or do this? It's more like a heel sprint. Maybe in terms of what's going on with my heart rate. But I'm having fun. I'm keeping the body under control. And then I can go back to something simpler. Big fan of. I'm a big fan of speedball. Boxers will use that speed bag, but soccer players won't. You will find some tennis players who practice this close to the wall. I'm a fan of it. I like having multiple actions per second. I'm getting better objectively. I'm no longer terrible at football compared to where I was it's only been really the last two, three months. I've taken it a bit more seriously, a bit more consistently. I wouldn't say I'm serious about it. I'd say that tend to have one longer session per week and I play around with the ball in between to get started. These letting the ball bounce, then tapping it up a really nice way, starting with juggling can be frustrating because you kick the ball all over the place. Just let it bounce, let it bounce, stay in the game, don't waste time going to get the ball and you'll find you get better way faster. Take the ego out of it. Most soccer players can't do this. It's a bit of a kick in the nuts. If you're watching this and you're seeing some middle aged guy in his 40s doing something that you can't do after three months of practice. But that's new athlete. We have better methods, better logic and we're able to be calm about our development, simply improve day to day. That's why this is the number one solution for any sport, any athlete. Because when you get the mentality and you download it, you're already better than me. If you're a football player, you're better than me at all this stuff, that's cool. But the mentality is what's going to take you to the next level. And when you have this habit of developing yourself 1, 2, 3 hours a day on the ball in this creative way, you go to a level that others can't dream of. The coach is just shocked, like why? Why is every touch going where he wants it to? Why is he getting so much better? And you see a lot of the best players in history, they talk about how they practiced a lot against the wall, but they were still in the old school mentalities a lot of the time with that. They might have been creative in some way, but they weren't looking to be creative in every way. Like what's everything that I can do with a soccer ball? And the more you have that mind towards early expansion, you get better so much faster. Wolfgang Schulhorn, the best expert in skill development, talks about as getting the brain out of bed. Most athletes don't want to get the brain out of bed every day. They're going to continue to do what they've been doing because that's where their brain can be comfortable. That's where the brain can stay in the bed. One of the ones I've been working on to show some vulnerability about being terrible is with the Hip touch. So I'm trying to get better. I'm getting better. There you go. Probably my best one. I want to be able to play the ball more off the hip. You see the Brazilian street jugglers playing around with it. I want to get this back. Also playing around a lot with behind the back, Playing off all parts of the feet, Off the sole of the foot. I know you're thinking like, yeah, I've seen people on Instagram thousand times better than you. What are you talking about? I'm two months into this. I'm 42 and I don't play soccer. Think about it. You do this with every sport, all the mainstream sports, and you train to produce more force. You're going to the top. You're going to the top in whatever you want to do as a coach, as a father, as a businessman. I don't care what you want to be good at. If you can do this, if you've got this mentality and you can put yourself into this situation day after day, there's no stopping you. This is so far beyond what something like CrossFit or powerlifting or doing triathlons or running a marathon can give you, because it restructures your brain for success. It rewires you for creativity. It's never been done before. I get it. There's going to be the unbelievers. It takes time. I'm by far the best new athlete in the world today because I'm the only one who's taken it seriously so far. That's okay. It always has to start like this. It's the first follower that makes the biggest difference. I'm looking for the person who's going to go way ahead of me in this stuff, who's going to really understand it and do some work. Because it's going to take some work to go past me. If you haven't done soccer before and you want to get a thousand alternating foot juggles, it's going to take some work. If you haven't done tennis before and you want to beat me against the wall in the tennis or at table tennis, it's going to take some work. But the fun is in doing that work. The fun is in exploring who you can become and going back to yourself of like, oh, I'm still not there yet. I will never be there. I'm not there with any of this stuff. I look at the standards in the world of football, it's like, yeah, okay, I'm nowhere. I'm nothing. I'm never will be. But I love it. I love the challenge of feeling myself go that one step further and you will, too. This goes way beyond getting a big sweat up. I'm getting a big sweat up. It's easy to get a sweat up. It's easy to work hard like Goggins. Maybe it's not that easy to work that hard like Goggins, but what most people won't do is get their brain out of bed every day, Build phenomenal skills in many areas. I don't know if you can hear it, but there's music going on in the background here. I'm pretty sure you can. This music was from a time of greatness. I don't know how they trained athletically, but their music is so far beyond our music today that I know that they were athletically far superior. You look at the gyms of those times, these big gymnastics halls. They were big, open air, light, high ceilings, just like this one. And they set different standards. The buildings had different standards. The music had different standards. The culture had different standards. This is how it starts. Stand it.
