DEVELOPMENT OF BALANCE AND INHIBITION OF RETURN IN FOOTBALL: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL INSIGHTS

The present study aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of an intervention program that includes specific means of the BrainKinetik methods, in the case future football players. The study was conducted between March and December 2024 and involved 20 athletes in the U8-U10 age group, from the German Football Academy. They were divided into two groups (experimental and control), each consisting of 10 athletes. Both groups performed their training sessions on the same days and at the same hour, with each session lasting the same amount of time (120 minutes). During the first 30-40 minutes of training, the groups completed different exercises: the control group did traditional athletic warm-up exercises, and the experimental group engaged in activities from the intervention program. For dynamic balance assessment, the Bass test was used, while cognitive flexibility was assessed with the Inhibition of Return Test (IOR), using the CogniFit platform. To compare the results of the experimental group and the control group in terms of dynamic balance and IOR scores, the U test was performed. Also, to examine whether there are significant differences between the initial and final results of each group the Wilcoxon non-parametric test was used. Considering dynamic balance, athletes from both groups recorded significantly better values (p = 0.005) at the end of the study period. The athletes’ cognitive flexibility indicated, through measures of central tendency, that the experimental group showed improvements in both response time and accuracy, while the control group showed no improvement in speed, as reflected by their response time results.