Happy Friday!  I hope you’re gearing up for a great hockey weekend, getting started with this week’s Playbook.

It’s been a very fun week for hockey fans, getting to see all the World Cup Qualifiers and more games from countries we don’t always get a lot of coverage of.  I’ve been enjoying seeing more of the Egyptian Men, the Chilean women, the French and the Japanese teams.  It’s awesome watching such a high level of play by athletes from non-traditional hockey powers.

Loads of great goals of course but a couple of really outstanding Tomahawk (reverse side) shots caught my eye and made me re-examine a debate i’ve participated in a few times.

Should you hit a Tomahawk off your left or your right foot?

I’ll spoil the punchline, as with so many of these debates - the correct answer is likely…”it depends”.  Ok, if that’s the case — what does it depend on and why?  This is what I’ll spend a little time digging into today.

The Right Foot

Ok so my co-founder Ross Gilham-Jones recently released a very detailed tutorial on perfecting your technique and all his teaching here focused on hitting off the right foot.

Now, he has very good reasons for this.

Power is mostly created by rotation.  The more rotation you can generate on your backswing, separating the movement of your shoulders & upper body from your hips, the more power you can generate.  This is the same underlying biomechanical theory that we see in a Golf swing or hitting a tennis shot.

Because the Tomahawk swing moves anti-clockwise around our body, you can generate more rotation from a split stance with the right foot in front than if the stance is reversed.

Elite power and ball speed is a very reliable way to beat the Goalkeeper. So when choosing which foot to hit off, optimizing for more rotation and more power is a good choice.

The Left Foot

So what?  I hear you ask, is the reason for hitting off your left foot?   Well this is where some of the goals I saw this week come in.  Let’s have a watch.

Goal One: Ryoma Ooka for Japan

Goal Two: Benjamin Marqué for France

These are both spectacular goals, and they are using a noticeable different technique to our tutorial video.  In both cases, the ball is much further behind the player and the players’ weight is back on their left foot rather than their right.

In my opinion this is more difficult to execute and you are likely not going to get the same power as a right foot shot.  However we can see from these goals some of the unique advantages this technique has.

1. As we talked about in recent months in this newsletter, the ability to hit from the backspace is so, so valuable because it is almost impossible for a defender to block.   The ball is protected for longer and you’re able to get the shot away before a stick gets in the way.
2. Hitting from almost behind your body hides and disguises the ball from the Goalkeeper.  The keeper will see the ball much later than with a traditional left foot tomahawk and so even if it doesn’t have the same power, the disguise makes up for it.

I have to reiterate this is much more physically demanding, you need more balance and more flexibility and elite body control to be able to get enough upper body rotation from this stance to hit with any power and consistency at all.  However, if you practice enough to develop the technique then the advantages are clear.

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So which should you practice?

I think the right foot technique is the base foundation that you should learn first.  It gives you the best platform to develop a nice flat swing and understand how you will generate power.  And Ross’s tutorial is a really excellent guide to this.

If you follow those steps, really master it and can consistently get off powerful shots in match situations, then increase your options and start practicing the left foot technique.  How should you go about that?  Well, I’m off to ask Ross to film another video… stay tuned ;-)

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