Hammer Squeeze

Today we’re going to be talking about a striker technique that’s can be very important. And if you know how to do it very useful, it’s called the hammer, or in some say the squeeze, and it goes like this …

All right, so the big question, why would you use the hammer technique? Why would you use it? I mean, it looks quite weird. And it’s quite hard to get good contact, but why would you use it. So, if the defender is in your back, and you’re with your back to the goal, you can turn left, obviously, or you can turn left and right, either way. However, sometimes you surprise defenders and goalkeepers, you can actually leave the ball where it is move your body out the way and smack the ball on top to try and get a quicker shot out. And it can work really nicely.

So the big question, how do we do the hammer? Well, first of all, let’s talk about our hands. Usually, when we hit a normal forehand, our hands are like this. And we’re trying to hit the forehand. With this part of the stick. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to turn the stick a little bit like this, but we’re going to try and keep our hands on the top, because we’re going to be hitting down onto the ball. So your hands need to turn a little bit, you need to try and close the face of the stick because we’re hitting on top of the ball and not on the side of the ball.

Now that we have the hands down, the second part is to get your footwork in place. So the hard part about the hammer squeeze is to try and move your body in a way that you don’t hit your own shins or you don’t hit your own feet, and you can still get the right contact and power on the ball. How that looks is because you’re facing with your back to the goal. When you have the ball here, you really need to try and dance out of the way. So you need to really jump and dance out of the way. Usually you can pivot off your right foot, like when you play basketball, you can step back and move your left foot back. Don’t move it back too far. Just move it out of the way. And when you’re moving it out of the way. That’s the moment when you’re sticking, come down. Here you can see when I hit the ball, I have my shoulders in place, my feet are okay. And I can turn really quickly because it’s just as simple as doing like that.

Okay, so the most important thing when it comes to the hammer is how do I get the right contacts. And how do I make sure I don’t hit into the ground or the ball flies over the fence or doesn’t reach the goal at all we’re trying to do, just like with the chop technique, we’re going to try and create a 45 degree angle where you can tap the ball on top that it tends to elevate so it goes up. So sometimes if you hit too far into the ground, the ball might roll but it won’t leave the ground. And if you get hit it too far on top, it’ll stay where it is and it’ll actually hurt the wrists. So what we’re going to try and do is we’re going to try and hit the ball on the top so that it gets a nice start and accelerates off your stick.