ITALIAN CHAMPIONS AND THE ROOM OF THE MIND

Franco Barresi, Roberto Donadoni, Roberto Baggio: the names are synonymous with the glory years of Milan.
They are also etched in the memory of every Italian fan who has witnessed the country’s defeats on penalties at the 1990 and 1994 World Championships.
All three talked about the trauma they felt from missing penalties. All three sought solace in the “MIND ROOM”, the first Italian football laboratory.
In addition to stress relief and cognitive training, the Mind room also focused on improving the players’ reaction speed using response time tests.
Participants were presented with two buttons and a pair of light bulbs, by clicking the left or right button if the corresponding light bulb lit the flashing arrows, often pointing in the opposite direction to the light on, were used to achieve a greater degree of difficulty at the ‘examination. By combining antistress therapy with cognitive training and neuroscience, the laboratory’s impact would be felt as far as Chelsea, where its founder built a similar facility in 2009.
“You can’t train 37 year old players to become physically faster, but you can train them to become faster in situational analysis,” says Demichelis.