Core strength and abdominal strength is absolutely key, if you’re looking to have the stability and the power within the goal swing to hit the ball a long the way. Now working on the abdominal muscles there’s a lot of exercises you can do but this is a great one that you can build into your routine to really identify that part of the body. It’s an overhead crunch with raised legs using a medicine ball. Now, it’s quite a hard one to do so you can start off with a lighter medicine ball if you want or no medicine ball at all, if you really feel necessary but it’s a fantastic exercise to really start to engage the abdominal muscles. Now what it involves is lying down, nice and flat on the back before getting the legs nice and straight and then drawing them up so they’re straight above the head in this position, pretty much vertical to the sky.

Now, without the medicine ball it would just simply involve raising yourself up and trying to get as near your toes as you can. Now, the medicine ball is keeping outward extended nice and straight lifting yourself up and just trying to get into the ankles. Now what this does as you stretch up and you lift up, it engages the abdominals as you start to crunch upwards the actual feet. Now the more and more you do this, the more strength you are going have to generate within the abdominals and that’s going to increase the power and the stability that you need as you actually come through the ball. So you don’t have to use the medicine ball to begin with but if you can build up to it, it will give you so much more power going forward.