Footballers add novelty, variety and challenge to sharpen cognitive and perceptual skills

Can brain train­ing make bet­ter foot­ballers? (The Guardian):

“It sounds like a game designed for tod­dlers – throw­ing and catch­ing a ball to encour­age talk­ing – but, accord­ing to coach­es at Southamp­ton FC, brain-train­ing tech­nique Life Kinetik is the lat­est weapon in the war to stop mod­ern life ruin­ing the beau­ti­ful game…

Horst Lutz, the Ger­man founder of Life Kinetik, says the tech­nique is about more than forc­ing friend­li­ness. It aims to make the brain sharp­er through exer­cis­es that test phys­i­cal, cog­ni­tive and per­cep­tu­al skills. In one exer­cise, par­tic­i­pants must throw their part­ner a ball and, at the same time, shout out which hand they want it to be caught in. Mean­while, their part­ner must step for­ward with their oppo­site leg to catch it.

“The idea is to make the most of our brains, mak­ing new con­nec­tions between our neu­rons by doing things we haven’t done before,” Lutz explains. “For foot­ballers, the main focus is reac­tion speed and [mak­ing] few­er errors.”

To learn more:

• New $3m Euro­pean-Israeli col­lab­o­ra­tion to enhance foot­ball (soc­cer) play­ers’ game intelligence
• The Ten Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Brains
• How learn­ing changes your brain