Football Kicking Drills for Beginners: Your First 8 Weeks

Start here: the biggest mistake new kickers make is trying to kick far before they can kick straight. Distance is the last thing you build, not the first. Spend your first weeks on plant foot, contact point and a repeatable approach, all from short range. Everything else follows.

This guide gives you twelve drills in a sensible order, an eight-week structure to run them in, and clear signals for when you are ready to progress. No equipment beyond a ball, a tee and some cones.

Before Your First Kick

Three things to sort out before you start, because getting them wrong makes every drill less useful.

Get a tee at your legal height

You need a consistent ball position or you cannot repeat anything. For beginners, a 2-inch tee is usually the right call — the extra clearance means slightly imperfect contact still produces a decent kick, and early success matters enormously for motivation. Confirm the legal height for your league first; our rules guide explains how.

Know your plant foot

Your plant foot is the non-kicking foot. It lands beside the ball and everything else depends on it. If you kick with your right foot, your left foot is your plant foot.

Where it lands decides where the ball goes. Too far behind and you lean back and slice. Too close and you cramp your swing. Roughly level with the ball and about a football’s width to the side is the starting point.

Accept that you will be bad for a while

Every kicker was. The ones who get good are the ones who keep showing up while they are still bad. Six weeks of consistent short-range work will change your kicking more than six months of turning up occasionally and swinging hard.

Nobody has ever improved their kicking by taking a hundred angry swings from 45 yards. Improvement lives at 20 yards, where you can actually feel what you are doing.

The Warm-Up (Non-Negotiable)

Kicking is explosive and hard on the hip flexors and groin. Cold-kicking is how beginners pick up strains that take weeks to settle. Five to ten minutes, every session, no exceptions.

1. Easy jog, 3 minutes. Raise your body temperature. Do not sprint.
2. Leg swings, 15 each way per leg. Front to back, then side to side. Hold something for balance. Controlled, not violent.
3. Walking lunges, 10 per leg. Opens the hip flexors, which take the most load in a kicking motion.
4. Hip circles, 10 each direction. Knee up, rotate the hip through its full range.
5. Ten half-power kicks. From close range, at maybe 50% effort. Your last warm-up step is kicking gently, not kicking hard.

Phase 1: Form Drills (Weeks 1–2)

No distance work at all in these two weeks. You are teaching your body a motion. Distance would just embed whatever you are currently doing wrong.

Drill 1: The no-ball swing

What: Take your full approach and swing through where the ball would be. No ball at all. 20 reps.

Why: Without a ball to hit, you stop trying to hit and start noticing your mechanics. Most beginners discover their balance is poor the moment there is nothing to swing at.

How: Set your steps. Approach at game speed. Swing through. Hold your finishing position for three full seconds. If you wobble, you were off balance. Repeat until you can hold all 20.

Drill 2: Plant foot placement

What: Place a cone where your plant foot should land. Approach and land on it. 20 reps, no kicking.

Why: Plant foot position is the foundation. Get this automatic and half your accuracy problems disappear before you start.

How: Set the cone level with the ball, about a football’s width to the side. Walk it first. Then jog it. Then full speed. Only progress when you hit it consistently.

Drill 3: Slow-motion contact

What: From one step, kick the ball 5 yards at maybe 20% power. 25 reps.

Why: At full speed you cannot feel where your foot meets the ball. At 20% you can feel everything.

How: Ball on the tee, laces forward. One step. Strike the sweet spot just below the ball’s centre with the top of your foot — not your toe. The ball should travel low and straight. If it spins sideways, your foot is coming across the ball.

Phase 2: Contact Drills (Weeks 3–4)

Now you add power — but still not distance. You are learning to strike cleanly at speed.

Drill 4: The 20-yard groove

What: 30 kicks from 20 yards, straight on. That is the entire drill.

Why: Repetition at a manageable distance is how the motion becomes automatic. This is the single most valuable drill for a beginner and the one most people skip because it feels boring.

How: Same setup, same steps, same swing, thirty times. Track how many are good. When you are hitting 24 of 30 cleanly, you are ready to progress.

Drill 5: Laces check

What: 15 kicks where you deliberately set the laces forward, then 5 where you set them sideways.

Why: Feeling the difference teaches you why the laces rule matters far better than being told.

How: Notice how the sideways-laces kicks fly unpredictably. That is what happens in a game when you rush your setup.

Drill 6: One-step kicks

What: 20 kicks using only a single step of approach.

Why: Removes momentum, so all the power has to come from your leg mechanics. Exposes whether you are relying on running at the ball rather than swinging properly.

Drill 7: Target halves

What: From 20 yards, aim 10 kicks at the left half of the uprights and 10 at the right half.

Why: Teaches you that you can aim. Beginners often kick at “the goal” rather than a specific point, which is why their misses scatter.

Phase 3: Consistency Drills (Weeks 5–6)

Drill 8: Five in a row

What: From 25 yards, make five consecutive kicks. Miss one, restart the count. Continue until you achieve it.

Why: Introduces consequence. Kick four then miss and you feel something — that feeling is a mild version of game pressure.

Drill 9: The angle ladder

What: From 25 yards, kick from five positions across the field: far left, left hash, centre, right hash, far right. Three kicks each.

Why: Games do not happen from the centre. Angles change your aiming line and most beginners have never practised from the sideline.

Drill 10: The distance ladder

What: Start at 20 yards. Make one, move back 5 yards. Miss, move forward 5. Continue for 20 kicks.

Why: Finds your genuine range rather than your imagined one, and rewards accuracy rather than power.

Phase 4: Range and Pressure (Weeks 7–8)

Drill 11: Tired legs

What: Sprint 40 yards, jog back, immediately kick. Repeat 10 times.

Why: In a game you kick with elevated heart rate and adrenaline. Practising only when fresh means your first pressure kick is the first time you have ever felt it.

Drill 12: One-kick game

What: At the end of every session, one kick. Make it and the session was a success. Miss and it was not. One attempt only.

Why: This is the closest a solo practice can get to a real field goal. It teaches you to produce on demand, which is the actual job.

The 8-Week Schedule

Want a plan built around your own schedule instead? The Training Planner generates one, and the Drill Generator builds individual sessions around a focus.

How to Know You’re Improving

Beginners often improve steadily and cannot tell, because they are measuring the wrong thing. Distance is the slowest metric to move. Watch these instead:

• Make percentage at 20 yards. The cleanest early signal. From roughly half to consistently above 80% is normal progress over eight weeks.
• Miss spread. Early misses scatter everywhere. Later they cluster to one side. A consistent miss is a fixable miss.
• Balance on finish. Can you hold your follow-through for three seconds without stepping? That improves before your accuracy does.
• Angle gap. The difference between centre and wide accuracy should narrow.
• Contact sound. Clean strikes make a distinctly different noise. You will start hearing it.

Write these down. Memory is unreliable and flattering. The Training Progress Tracker logs attempts, makes, distance and conditions so patterns surface within two or three weeks.

Beginner Mistakes to Avoid

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should a beginner practise kicking?

Three sessions a week is the sweet spot for most beginners. That gives you enough repetition to build a motor pattern while leaving recovery time between sessions.

Kicking loads the hip flexors and groin heavily, and beginners have not yet built the specific conditioning for it. Four sessions is fine once you are past the first month; every day is not.

How many kicks should I take per session?

Twenty to thirty quality kicks. That sounds low, and it is deliberately low. Once fatigue sets in your technique breaks down, and kicking with broken technique teaches your body the wrong thing.

Stop when the quality drops, not when you reach a number. A focused twenty beats a sloppy hundred every time.

How long until I see improvement?

Most beginners who train three times a week see a clear difference in accuracy within four to six weeks. Distance takes longer — often several months — because it depends on building specific leg speed and conditioning.

Track your make percentage at a fixed distance rather than how far you can kick. It moves first and it tells you more.

Do I need a coach to start?

No, but you need feedback. A coach is the best source; a phone camera is the next best. Film from directly behind your plant foot and you will see approach angle, plant position and follow-through clearly.

The things you cannot feel are exactly the things video shows you.

What equipment do I actually need?

A ball, a tee at your legal height, and a few cones. That is genuinely it for the first eight weeks.

A net becomes useful later because it saves you retrieving balls, which means more reps per session. But do not let missing equipment stop you starting — the drills above need almost nothing.

Should I kick soccer-style or straight-on?

Soccer-style, almost certainly. It is what essentially every modern kicker uses at every level because it produces more power and better accuracy through a larger contact surface.

Straight-on is a historical style you will occasionally see, but there is no good reason for a beginner to learn it today.

What to Do After the Eight Weeks

Finishing the programme is a checkpoint, not an endpoint. Here is how to continue.

1. Retest your baseline. Twenty kicks from your benchmark distance, logging miss directions. Compare against week one. That comparison tells you what the eight weeks actually achieved.
2. Identify your default miss. By now a pattern should exist. A consistent miss is a fixable miss, and our accuracy drills guide maps patterns to the drill that addresses them.
3. Add kickoffs. If you have only done placekicks so far, kickoffs roughly double your value to a team. See our kickoff guide.
4. Start extending range carefully. Only once your make percentage at benchmark distance is consistently high. Range you cannot hit with is not range.
5. Talk to your coach. Eight weeks of logged, structured practice is a genuine credential. Show them the numbers.

Staying Motivated Through the Slow Weeks

Weeks one and two of this programme are form work with no distance and no visible progress. That is when most beginners quit, so it is worth naming in advance.

• Expect no visible improvement for a fortnight. You are building a motor pattern, and motor patterns consolidate before they show results.
• Measure the right thing. Track whether your plant lands consistently, not whether kicks go through. Early progress lives in the setup.
• Film week one. Comparing week-six footage against week-one footage is far more motivating than remembering how it felt.
• Keep sessions short. Thirty focused minutes three times a week is sustainable. Two-hour sessions are not, and burnout ends more kicking careers than difficulty does.

A Final Word to Beginners

The hardest part of this programme is not any individual drill. It is accepting that the first fortnight produces no visible results, and turning up anyway.

Kicking rewards patience unusually heavily. The motion has to become automatic before it can become accurate, and automatic takes repetitions rather than effort. Kickers who understand that and grind through the quiet weeks end up considerably better than more naturally gifted athletes who quit during them.

Three sessions a week, twenty-five quality kicks, eight weeks. That is the whole ask, and it is enough to make you a genuine candidate for a roster spot.

What good looks like after eight weeks

You should be able to state your default miss direction without checking your notes, hold your finishing position for three seconds without wobbling, and make a clear majority of your kicks from twenty yards with an identical setup each time. Distance will still be modest and that is entirely fine — range is built on top of a reliable motion, never instead of one.

Keep Going

This guide is general training information, not medical or coaching advice tailored to an individual. If you have an existing injury or pain while kicking, stop and consult a qualified professional.