An action plan will give you direction on how you will achieve your goal and it is something you can directly control. Your focus should be on your action plan about 90 percent of the time if you are a serious athlete. By developing a solid action plan and sticking to it no matter what, you will continue to move closer to accomplishing your long-term goals. Your action plan should cover each area of training and life that will help or hurt you as a soccer player – position-specific skills, footwork & dribbling, agility, strength, conditioning, mindset, nutrition, rest/recovery, sleep, etc. When developing your plan, you should look at your strengths and areas that need the most improvement. For example – if your best offensive attribute is shooting from mid-range and your worst is your ability to place through passes well, then drills to develop these skills should be included in your action plan for offensive skills.
Your action plan should be very specific – you don’t want to leave yourself any room to make excuses. This means you will write down the drills and exercises you will do along with how much time you will spend per week working on them. You can even take it a step further and plan out the specific times and days of your workouts each week. To hold yourself accountable to the plan, you can make it into a checklist that you complete each week, and post it somewhere that you will see it every day. Your plan should change when your schedule does (fall season, winter, spring season, when school ends, etc.). A good action plan will include extra work. If you are only doing workouts with your team(s), you won’t set yourself apart from the best competition.
Aim high when it comes to your goals and develop a specific action plan to achieve them!