Learn Futsal: The art of preparation

January 25, 2015by Jalson0

You’ll have heard the importance of preparation a million times, whether it is a school exam, job interview or match day. You’re probably sick of hearing it. But, there’s a reason you keep hearing it – it is absolutely true. Preparation is paramount for success in any form.

Futsal PreparationEngland-Futsal-1

You maybe thinking; “Yeah but, once I was successful although I did no preparation, I just winged it”. Sure, we all have examples of this. But after countless hours on the Futsal court improving technical skills through drills, watching youtube to learn tactics, working out in the weight room and hours on the track and roads pushing your body to the limits of strength and endurance, do you really want to rely on ‘winging it’ for success on matchday?

Prepare To Be A Champion

So how do the best athletes prepare? At Carlisle Futsal Club one of the first things we do with our elite players is perform a task called ‘control the controllables’, because everything we will do in our future training will involve a topic from our controllables task list.

Control the controllables involves separating all the factors which can affect performance into ‘controllables’ and ‘uncontrollables‘, i.e. those which we can take control of, and those which we cannot.

[one_half]Controllable’s

  • Diet and Hydration
  • Kit and Equipment
  • Training
  • Tapering
  • Mental Rehearsal
  • Game Plan
  • Venue Walk Through
  • Self Reflection

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[one_half_last]Uncontrollable’s

  • Opponent
  • Referee
  • Coaches Decisions
  • Changing Room/Warm Up Area
  • Competition Environment
  • Media Coverage

[/one_half_last]

Controlling the ‘controllables’ enables us to focus on the aspects of Futsal that we can improve ourselves, this makes the concept relevant to preparation and optimising performance.

A lot of athletes and coaches in a range of sports sometimes have tendency to focus on the uncontrollables and allow these to impact on performance, and this would be a mistake, the clue is in the title!

Our uncontrollables all have one thing in common – while we cannot control them directly, we can control our response to them.

A good example of this would be in the FA Cup yesterday (24th Jan 2015) when Bradford played Chelsea. Bradford sitting 7th in League one 49 places below Chelsea who are one of the worlds richest Football Clubs. This was a massive uncontrollable factor for Bradford, however with the right training (controllable) and game plan (response to uncontrollable), David beat ‘Goliath’ to progress to the next round.

Taking care of our controllables is about preparing to succeed, putting ourselves in the best possible position to get the result we want. The better quantity of controllables and uncontrollables and the ability to handle them is, better preparation and subsequent level of success can be achieved.

Be The Technician – Master What We Can Control

Here is an excellent video from the Stanford University American football team entitled ‘The Technician’, a great example on how prepared an athlete can be.

[iframecode url=’https://www.youtube.com/embed/StnP40wHFXs’]

The video highlights not only the level of detail that these athletes go into to be the best, but also that this preparation is part of everyday life for them.Preparation is all about consistency, routines and discipline, and this is summed up in a key phrase from their head coach:

“Master the things which take no talent.”

Preparation is everything thats why it is the minimum requirement for anyone expecting and aspiring to represent our Club at FA National League level.

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ABOUT CARLISLE FUTSAL

Carlisle Futsal Club is an English futsal club, based in North Cumbria. We feature one of the most prominent and established youth futsal academies in Great Britain.

Our mission is to create a Club that the people of Carlisle can be proud of.

Members of