Computer Simulation of Ball Kicking Using the Finite Element Skeletal Foot Model

Several investigators have studied the motion analysis of kicking in football (Plagenhoef, 1971; Cabri et al., 1988; Lees, 1996). However, there are only few studies of the interaction between the kicking foot and ball at impact (Asami and Nolte, 1983). The control of the initial conditions and the boundary conditions of the foot and ball at impact by an experimental approach is more difficult than that by a computational approach (Asai et al., 2002).