A bicycle kick, also known as scissors and overhead kick is an athletic move in soccer which is performed by throwing your body up into the air.

The bicycle kick name comes from the two legs that look as if pedaling a bicycle while performing it.

Major Situations

In soccer there are two major situations where this soccer kick can be pretty useful:

• When playing defender and you want to clear the ball from your penalty area.
• Playing as a striker and having your back to the opponent’s goal.

Avoiding Pain

When you start to practice on your bicycle kick moves, it may hurt a little. To give you an idea about how much it hurts, you could have a friend punching you in the back with force.

If your friend is strong enough to knock the wind out of you, it will give you an idea about what it feels like.

To avoid this feeling you could try to practice on a soft ground in the beginning. After the bicycle motion becomes more natural you could try to perform it on grass.

Hours of Practice

A bicycle kick is not something you will learn in a single practice; instead you have to spend many hours on practicing it.

You must feel that performing a bicycle kick is something natural. It’s also important that you are not afraid when practicing on your bicycle kick, because it will just hurt more.

Of course that’s easy for me to say now since I am an experienced soccer player, but when I started to practice on bicycle kicks many years ago, my parents wondered what the heck I was doing because half of my body was full of bruises.

How to Score?

To score a goal with a bicycle kick you need to master several moments:

1. Try to always kick the ball with accuracy.

2. Hit the goal.

3. Land safely.

Summary

As you can see it’s not just about throwing your body in the air and hoping for the best, instead, you need to practice, practice and practice again to become skillful on this kick method.

If you are completely new to soccer I would not recommend you learning this skill right away. Take the time to get the fundamentals of soccer down. Performing a bicycle kick will always be risky.

It’s not just about keeping yourself safe, instead, you have to keep in mind that you could actually hit an opponent’s head instead of the ball and therefore you must always analyze the particular situation.

But… the feeling of scoring goals with the bicycle kick is something you must experience by yourself!