The season ends the same way every year. One last extra point, cleats tossed in the bag, and then a long stretch of months where nobody is charting your kicks. What you do with that stretch is the difference between showing up in August as the same kicker and showing up as a better one.
Here’s the part nobody tells you: the offseason is not a kicks-accumulation contest. It’s a rebuild. You audit what broke last season, you fix the technique, you build the body that can hold that technique for a full season, and then you put the whole operation back together before spring. Rush that order and you’ll spend January repeating your old mistakes with new enthusiasm.
This is a 12-week structure, not a promise. I can’t promise you yards — nobody honest can. What I can give you is the order of operations that good kickers follow, with checklists you can run this week.
Weeks 1–2: Audit Before You Train
Before you take a single rep, get honest about last season. Pull your game film — or your own practice film if that’s what you have — and chart it. Makes and misses by distance. By hash. Direction of every miss: push, pull, low, line-drive. You’re not judging yourself here. You’re hunting for the two or three things that showed up more than once, because those are the things a plan can actually fix.
Then film ten practice kicks from behind and from the side. Watch three things: where your plant foot lands, where your foot meets the ball, and where your swing finishes. If you want a picture of the standard, this is the video I point kickers toward when they’re building their own film routine:
If contact is where your film keeps pointing, our breakdown of consistent foot-to-ball contact covers the details before you build reps on top of them.
Your audit checklist
- Game film charted by distance, hash and miss direction
- Ten practice kicks filmed from behind and from the side
- Two or three recurring technique issues written down
- One physical note: where your body felt weak or beat up late in the season
- Kickoff distance and hang time measured, not guessed
More than three priorities and you’ll fix none of them. Pick the two that showed up most and build the plan around them.
Weeks 3–6: The Technique Block
Volume stays low in this block. Quality does not. Two or three sessions a week, each one short and filmed, is plenty. Every session gets one theme — contact, plant spot, or swing path — and every rep gets judged against that theme, not against distance.
Most of your reps should come from inside 35 yards. Short kicks are where clean contact gets built, and clean contact is what range is made of later. Chasing long balls in January is how kickers groove a swing they can’t repeat under a season’s load. Manage your rep count the way you’d manage money — our field goal kick count guide explains why quality falls off a cliff when the session runs too long.
Height and distance both come from the same places, and this video lays out where to look:
Weeks 7–10: The Strength and Speed Block
Now the gym takes the lead. The swing gets two short maintenance sessions a week so the technique you just rebuilt doesn’t rust while you lift. Everything else is hips, legs and speed.
For kickers, strength lives in the hips and in single-leg work. Hip flexors, glutes, adductors and the rotators around your trunk drive leg speed, and single-leg strength is what keeps your plant stable on cold, chewed-up turf in November. The hip-specific side of the lifting plan is covered in our guide to building hip strength for athletes.
Speed work belongs in this block too. Sprinting and kicking share mechanics — hip extension, stiffness at contact, coordination at speed — and one track session a week is enough to feed both. The one rule: technique sessions go on fresh days, never the morning after a heavy lift. Garbage reps on tired legs will make you think your swing broke when it didn’t.
Weeks 11–12: Put the Operation Back Together
The last block reconnects everything. Full approach steps. A holder if you can find one, a tee if you can’t. Kicks from both hashes. Charted sets with consequences — hit ten in a row from your money distance, and when you miss, reset the count the way you would in a game. If your school runs spring ball or you’ve got a camp on the calendar, this block sits right in front of it, because you want your operation sharp, not just your swing.
A Weekly Rhythm That Holds
| Day | Focus |
|---|---|
| Monday | Technique session, short and filmed |
| Tuesday | Lower body strength |
| Wednesday | Mobility plus light contact work |
| Thursday | Speed work or second strength day |
| Friday | Charted technique session with consequences |
| Saturday | Rest or easy movement |
| Sunday | Off |
Slide the days around to fit your life. What matters is the shape: technique on fresh legs, strength and speed in the middle, one full day off every week.
Mobility Holds the Whole Thing Together
Hips that won’t open will cap every block in this plan. Ten minutes a day of focused mobility keeps your swing path clean and keeps the groin and hip-flexor irritation that eats so many winters from ever starting. Our hip opener stretches for at home is the starting point, and it doubles as the seed of a daily routine you can actually keep.
What You Don’t Need
You don’t need new gear to run this. You need a ball, a tee, a wall for contact work, and a phone on something steady for film. If a net or a band makes your plan more likely to happen on a snowy Tuesday, buy one — otherwise skip it. The plan is the equipment.
The Whole Plan on One Checklist
- Weeks 1–2: film audit, charting, two or three written priorities
- Weeks 3–6: low-volume technique block, reps inside 35 yards, every session filmed
- Weeks 7–10: strength and speed lead, two technique maintenance sessions, mobility daily
- Weeks 11–12: full operation, both hashes, charted sets with consequences
- Every week: at least one full rest day, and technique always on fresh legs
One honest note before you start: none of this comes with a yardage promise. It comes with a structure — audit, rebuild, strengthen, reconnect — that keeps the best training window of your year from turning into twelve weeks of repeating December.
If you’d rather have a second set of eyes on your film before you lock in your priorities, that’s exactly what I do with kickers. Book a coaching session, send me your film, and we’ll build the plan around what your kicks actually show.
