Our Training

Played from the head to the foot!

COGNIGOALS equips professionals and established football players with polyvalent competencies, while providing younger talents with the foundation for developing a wide range of coordination and perception-related skills.
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Training goals for gaining the decisive edge!

Two-footedness

Breakthrough, systematic learning method for training and promoting two-footedness.

Creativity

Increased cognitive capacity and motor variability for creative action on the pitch.

Intuition

Increasing the variety and availability of motor output makes the player more unpredictable in the match.

Game intelligence

Development of cognitive abilities leads to more cognitive resources that can be used for game intelligent actions.

Learning speed

High learning speed through innovative exercise design with two-footedness as a booster.

Speed of action

Higher speed of action through improvement of executive functions.

Progressive learning

Progressive learning from novice to expert.

Polyvalence

Systematic development of "hybrid players" (players who can be used at the highest level in multiple positions).

Cognitive training

Overview
Two-footedness
Game intelligence
Creativity

Good to know...

The field of cognitive training methods in sports is diverse. The term encompasses both perceptual-motor training methods (anticipation training, eye movement training, etc.) and (sport) psychological training methods (self-instruction training, movement representation training, etc.).

However, these methods currently play hardly any role in the training of licensed coaches, which is why they are also generally not sustainably used in training. As part of their training, football coaches get educated on the different components that drive performance: strength, endurance, and speed training improve the constitution of the athletes, tactical and technical training open up the development of individual and team strengths or the preparation for opponents.
Of course, there is also an endless variety of training forms to improve the ability to play, in which small groups play with different requirements. If we take these training methods of modern football and add the work of a sports psychologist, such as emotional or motivational development, in elite development, we get a complete picture of a reasonable well-trained football player.

However, what makes a very good football player an outstanding player? It is a few percentage points in the cognitive area, coupled with fluid creativity and high cognitive flexibility. Such a player usually has one or more exceptional abilities and skills that make them excellent for use in a position on the field: creativity, game intelligence, and two-footedness.

Creativity

By creativity, we mean developing and changing different ways of solving problems in match situations.

Training creativity is often recommended with guided play (so-called street football), in which players are given no guidelines and are supposed to create solutions in the game. This variable and game-related transmission of creativity can certainly be classified as effective, but it also has a logical flaw. Imagine a player in a game situation that needs to be solved, e.g., a duel: the game situation consists of various stimuli (opponent, teammates, ball position, etc.) that the athlete perceives and creates a corresponding solution. In doing so, he draws on experience from past situations and his own repertoire of movements. The assumption that free play promotes creativity to a high degree without considering the athlete's past can therefore be questionable.

Here, we want specifically address the recourse to the movement repertoire. On the one hand, it consists of the techniques available (with one or both feet), on the other hand, of the execution possibilities of these techniques. These execution possibilities are decisive for creativity. If players have coupled movement patterns together, often referred to as "automated," they can only call them up within these patterns in game situations. They cannot stop ("decouple") or modify them without high cognitive effort in a short amount of time.

In order to develop real creativity in free play forms in training, existing movement patterns must first be decoupled so that the movement building blocks can be quickly combined with each other individually during the movement execution. However, this decoupling does not mean that successful movement patterns and automatisms should not be maintained and promoted. On the contrary, successful movement patterns that cannot be stopped despite intensive preparation of the opponent should be expanded. However, this has nothing to do with the creative training of the players.

Game intelligence

Another important building block for versatile (polyvalent) players is game intelligence. By game intelligence, we mean the purposeful derivation of actions from game situations for purposeful (team-based) action.

This distinguishes game intelligence decisively from creativity by bringing game situations into a larger context. This requires the player to perceive the entire game situation and to internally (cognitively) anticipate / simulate future changes on the playing field.

This perceptually-cognitive perspective on the construct of game intelligence also enables the consideration of the needle's eye. Only players have sufficient cognitive capacity to perceive the current situation and simulate the future game situation can they make intelligent decisions on a regular basis. However, expanding this capacity is not trivial, as not only cognitive processes rely on the so-called working memory, but also planning, replanning, and execution processes of movement patterns burden the working memory.

Of course, motor processes cannot be ignored in game situations, which is why the cognitive components of planning and replanning movement patterns should be called up or executed with as little cognitive effort as possible. The freed-up cognitive capacity can be used for decision-making in game situations through optimized resource use. Therefore, meaningful training of cognition should always include planning and replanning of movement actions, as well as putting other, progressively designed, additional strain on the working memory.

Two-footedness

To be able to solve game situations optimally at all times and on different positions on the playing field, the natural use of both feet is an essential component.

Professionals have similar abilities with both feet. It is surprising, however, that they do not use the non-dominant foot more often in play. In particular, in pressure situations, the better-placed non-dominant foot is only used as a last resort. From a training history perspective, this is not surprising - two-footedness is trained with high repetition numbers using the non-dominant foot or through specifications in game forms for the use of both feet. Even if the feeling for controlling the ball and the timing of actions gets better through the repetitions, the non-dominant foot never feels as good as the dominant foot. In addition, the players make significantly more errors when using their non-dominant foot, which is not changed by forcing them to use the weaker foot more during training and game forms.

The player is therefore necessarily outside his comfort zone (even if this is hardly visible from the outside), which has developed through years of training with the dominant foot. The result is that both feet are not used equally on the playing field according to the situation. To create a perceived two-footedness or to train two-footedness for the first time, it can therefore be considered useful to train the non-dominant foot in a comfort zone that is still systematically increased in difficulty during the learning process. It is exactly this principle that the COGNIGOALS Football Coach L1 and the COGNIGOALS Player Course L1 course leverage.

Try out our courses!

We offer a unique, cognitive movement training that, when added to regular football training, turns players into difference makers!