Five Dot Training for Foot Quickness

Five Dot Training

Five dot training is simply one type of foot quickness training.  There are literally hundreds of exercises that have been used, but we show here just a couple examples to get you started.

Drawing the Dots

Draw five dots on the ground.  At the field, use a can of line spray.  At home, use chalk or scratch your driveway with a rock, just as you would to play four square or hopscotch.

If you are training a group of players, draw enough side by side so that there are two players for every set of dots.

If you don't want to irritate your soccer club, use your field spray to paint the dots somewhere out of the way, off the playing field.

The distance between those two dots at the bottom should be standing width for your player's feet, perhaps just a little wider actually.  The distance to the single center dot is just one hop, as is the distance from the single center dot to the top two dots.

Two Leg Straddle

In this exercise, the player starts with a left foot on the left lower dot, and right foot on the right lower dot.

A hop brings both feet together on the center dot, another hop puts the left foot top left, and the right foot top right.

The player next hops and turns to face the bottom of the dot pattern, and returns to the starting position as shown.  The player completes five repetitions before the next player begins.

More Exercises

two legged hop	one legged hop	simple pattern

The two legged hop and the single legged hop are very demanding, try them yourself. 

The simple pattern shown above goes more to the point of foot quickness than the other exercises shown.  The player navigates to the top of the pattern, and then works back.

You and your players can devise many other patterns to challenge the players.  For example, you can imagine a pattern where the player visits each of the outside dots while keeping one foot on the center dot.  You can vary this by requiring that the foot on the center dot alternate with each outside dot visited, which requires a lot of twisting movement in combination with quick foot movement.