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BOOKS FOR MENTAL TRAINING

Kicking and punting require great discipline and mental strength. After you surpass the physical aspects of kicking a football, the only thing that separates you from your competition is mental. Luckily, mental strength can be practiced and learned like any other skill. These books below will give you a good start. Click on the book image to purchase from Amazon.com

Title	Author	Comments	Click on image for details
Sports Psyching	Thomas Tutko & Umberto Tosi	Best introduction to the mental game
Golf is Not a Perfect Game	Bob Rotella	Replace "club" with "leg", and this book makes an excellent teaching tool for the mental game of kicking
Zen Mind, Beginners Mind	Shunryu Suzuki	Very deep reading - must be read several times
The Miracle of Mindfulness	Thich Nhat Hahn	A simple yet insightful book worth reading
Zen and the Art of Archery	Eugene Herrigel	Great analogy for kicking. I have read it 5 times.
Zen in the Martial Arts	Joe Hyams	Not as good as Archery, but worth checking out
Sadaharu Oh - A Zen Way of Baseball	Sadaharu Oh & David Falkner	A great autobiography by an inspirational man
Thinking Body, Dancing Mind	Chungliang Al Huang	One of my all-time favorites
Creative Visualization	Ronald Shone	Pretty good at teaching visualization techniques
The Ultimate Athlete	George Leonard	Very interesting - philosophical not instructional

	Never let a missed kick interfere with your next one. Have you ever taken statistics? The probability of getting heads when you flip a coin never changes - even if you hit heads ten times in a row. This means that each flip of the coin is independent. It's the same with kicking. Even if you miss three kicks in a row, those three kicks have nothing to do with the next one. Those three kicks will only affect your next one if you allow it to
	-- Doug Brien

Doug and Tommy's Frequently Asked Questions: "Does the size of a kicker's foot affect his kicking ability (soccer style)? In other words is there an optimal foot size for kicking a football relative to the size of the football?
Do kickers with smaller feet have an advantage, or is it the other way around?
Am I at a disadvantage with an 11 1/2 foot or not? Can I overcome this, if so, how? Should I switch to toeing the ball?" -- Click here to read our answer