John Allpress - the former assistant head of academy player and coach development at Tottenham Hotspur and ex-coach developer for the FA - recently joined us for a webinar.

He offered a terrific insight into how players learn, what they need and how that can better inform your coaching.

At the end of the webinar, John took questions from attendees. These are some of the highlights...

How do you encourage players to use both feet more - not only in their passing, but when they are running with the ball or dribbling?

JA: If you want to encourage people to do something, the biggest thing is the encouragement itself.

It’s about having their back 100%, because they are might feel they are not going to be good enough. They might think one foot’s not good enough, and the other foot is where they get their success or how they can show what they can do.

It’s about saying: ’We are a club that likes players to be two-footed and two-sided’. And it’s important to understand the difference between the two.

Two-footed is being able to kick the ball and produce things with both feet. Two-sided is being able to go both sides – left and right. This makes you unpredictable.

Then, once you have got the club culture and the encouragement right, it is about running practices where they have to use both feet. 

If it’s a receiving practice and the ball’s coming to their right foot, get them to transfer it to their left foot or vice versa. 

If you’re doing ’ball and a wall’ [passing a ball against a wall or between team-mates], do alternate feet, left and right. Get them to do five on their left, then five on their right. 

Everything you do, talk about doing it with both feet. Even simple things like getting them to dribble through cones - get them to use both feet rather than one foot. You can have what we called ’wooden foot’ sessions, where they practice with their weaker foot.

Everything you do is then building into this process of saying: ’It’s a good thing to be as two-footed as you can be’.

Practising things in a two-footed way is important because it wakes up neural pathways. You’ve got exactly the same pathways on both sides of your body. It’s about making sure one is as awake as the other one. 

Also, doing two-footed stuff means that you build up stability and strength on both sides. If I’m kicking the ball with my right foot, my stability comes from my left thigh and the groin area where you have got to be strong, because that’s your base.