Sports education at the cutting edge: counting your breath, feeling body

This study examines the influence of breathing exercises on promoting body awareness in adolescents in the context of football training. The focus is on the experiential learning approach in order to analyse the potential of breath centring for cognitive, emotional and physiological perception processes. The central research question is: What influence does breath centring have on promoting body awareness in adolescents?The empirical study was conducted with a sample of adolescents aged between twelve and twenty. Findings from this study show that breathing exercises lead to improved perception of physical signals and greater confidence in self-assessment in most participants. In addition, the exercises had a calming effect on the pulse and reduced cognitive discrepancies between estimated and actual performance. Nevertheless, individual differences emerged, influenced by factors such as age, gender and personal experience.