“I am convinced that I have mastered playing with both feet thanks to those exercises”, says Dries Mertens, an attacking winger with the Belgium national football team and SSC Napoli. “Congratulations to Michel Bruyninckx”, adds Belgian teammate Steven Defour, a midfielder with Royal Antwerp FC: “He and SenseBall have helped me to become a pro”.
Defender Jan Verthongen (Tottenham Hotspur), midfielders Moussa Dembélé (Ex-Tottenham Hotspur) and Youri Tielemans (Leicester City) are among other Belgium internationals who have confirmed their faith in this method.
Between 2000 and 2011, in collaboration with the University of Louvain, Michel Bruyninckx developed a training method, focused on brain functioning, called “CogiTraining” together with its key tool “SenseBall”, and trained a sample of 200 young players (140 boys and 60 girls).
At the start, these children were not very exceptional, either technically or athletically speaking. They were simply young players from the area who were passionate about football and played football in small local clubs at weekends.
Nevertheless, 6 of these 140 boys have ended up playing for the male Belgian national team (among them, Dries Mertens and Steven Defour) and 50% of the female players that are core members of the women’s Belgian national football team have come from this sports study training scheme.
CogiTraining and SenseBall maximize the players’ training by means of drills that improve the brain organization, therefore enabling faster decision-making and increased accuracy in their movements.
The daily practice of SenseBall, (20 minutes per day), makes it possible for a young athlete to touch the ball approximately 500,000 times a year (whereas a professional who trains in the “traditional” way will only touch it about 50,000 times!). Most importantly, they play in a perfectly bilateral way (50% right foot; 50% left foot) which forms a complete two-footed player.
Moreover, after a year of practising CogiTraining with SenseBall, these young athletes improved their school results by 10% on average, which can be explained by the improved brain organization generated by this method.
In France, FC Metz are exclusive partners for France with CogiTraining-SenseBall. The under 15 side, continuously trained with the programme, has won this season’s French championship, beating clubs like Paris St. Germain along the way. “I strongly associate CogiTraining and SenseBall with the success and progress of our players”, confirms Bertrand Antoine, head of pre-training at FC Metz youth academy.
FC Metz training with Senseball
When Michel Bruyninckx started working with the Leuven Football Academy, things were not going too well with Belgium’s favourite sport. This proud footballing nation had not been producing significant talent for a whole generation and was not playing any role in major international tournaments for which it regularly failed to qualify.
Two decades later, Belgium, a semi-finalist in the last World Cup, has been recognized as one of the powerhouses in European football. Its present squad of players has been labelled a “Golden Generation” and it is only fair to give a large part of the credit for this “renaissance” to Michel Bruyninckx’s revolutionary method of CogiTraining–SenseBall
For more information, visit training football on elastic SenseBall and football training method CogiTraining
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