Working Toward Straight Leg, Straight Toe

Remember, straight leg, straight toe.  If there is one thing I see more than anything else with beginners and advanced alike, it’s the compression of the body during a kick.  I tell students things like ‘kick tall’ and ‘straight leg, straight toe’ to remind them to leverage the body during a swing.

This is something conveyed easier with video for our members, but for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll use some screen shots below.

Beginner Bent Leg, Toe Up, Crunch Kick

The bent leg follow throughThe image you see here is a soccer style kicker using a very common follow through….the ‘bent leg, toe up’ follow through.  I’ve drawn the red line to indicate what looks like a broken golf club to an extent.

I often tell kickers that if they can’t visualize what I mean by ‘leverage’ during a swing, just imagine trying to throw a baseball as far as you can down the field.  Will your arm be straight at your release point or will you keep it ‘bent’ at release?

Whether you have ever played baseball or not, most every kicker I ask always says the arm would be straight at release.  But why? 

Like a simple machine ‘lever’ (the simplest of all machines), a long bar (your arm in this example) helps you exert a bigger force when you apply pressure.  With a classic lever and fulcrum example, the force you apply with your weight on a see-saw for instance is increased the further you sit from the balance point (fulcrum.)

Straight leg, straight toeAll nerdy science aside, it just feels more natural to straighten the arm when releasing a baseball throw to maximize the force of the throw. With our kicking, we want to impact the ball with a straight leg and then hold that straight leg through the swing.

This is not to suggest that we can’t kick a ball with a bent leg.  Of course we can….we do it all the time with finesse kicks during a soccer game.

However, with our field goals and kick offs, we are trying to maximize that swing force which means lengthening the body, straitening the arms for better leverage (not like the student photo above, but more like Scott Blair’s finish here) and movement.

Finally, we want to keep that leg straight through the swinging motion.

Here is a photo of Scott Blair during a kick swing.  Compare this swing to the student above, where his arms are down, his knee is bent and his toe is up (the classic ‘crunched’ position and resulting weak kick.)

See how the leg remains straight through the swing?  Not only was it straight at impact, but it continues in a ‘locked’ position all the way through the kick.

Toe Straight Too?

What about the toe?  Well, again, not completely necessary (sometimes we keep the toe up to compensate for poor foot contact at impact….a bit of a feel thing to help the kick along) but certainly desired for a couple of reasons.

What it does do, is help with a cleanly rotating ball.  When you let the toe point up during your swing, the ball can come off the foot in an ‘unclean’ way.  I call this rotation the ‘flutter ball.’

Football Kicking Holder: ColossusTransitioning the toe into a pointed position from the golf club sweep position on field goals keeps it out of the way in some respects and allow the ball to rotate cleanly from impact to its ultimate flight path.

I tell students to keep the toe pointed and roll the toe from a golf club position at impact (kind of a sweep through the ball) into a straight extension from the leg as shown here.

One thing that helps to facilitate this movement….picture your toe at that height of follow through as pointing toward the inside post (the left post for a right footed kicker, the right post for a left footed kicker.)  I’ve drawn a mini field goal post to show the visualization.

Keeping the two pointed at the top of the follow through is something that takes some getting used to.  For soccer players, the sensation can feel almost ‘robotic’ after years of loosey-goosey soccer kicks in all their creative variations to manipulate a round ball.

However, remember this….in football, we only need one controlled swing to send the ball down the field in a controlled fashion.

Don’t get frustrated with this….it can take some work to make the transition, so repetitions without a ball are key for most kickers…it’s a muscle memory motion that is developed over time but you can do it with practice!!

Happy Kicking……