The keys to the metamorphosis of Dani Ceballos

Without a doubt, Dani Ceballos is having a beautiful moment and it is the uterine He has radically changed his situation at Real Madrid and He has returned to the Spanish national team at the hands of Luis de la Fuente.

Perhaps there are few examples of players who have managed to bend their way in the white team after no playing minutes and experiencing assignments. All this has a background work and GOAL has discovered one of the keys to the change in Ceballos.

By For three years he has been working personally with Bernardo Requena, High-quality sports advisor who has managed to maximize the physical qualities of the player and thanks to his preparation we know in detail what the changes have been that have allowed the final explosion of Dani Ceballos.The first is direct because Dani’s change has been radical, where’s the secret?

“Well I don’t think there’s any secret. Dani is in the shape he’s in at the moment, if you analyze his evolution in these seasons I would tell you it’s primarily because of his way of being. Dani has the mental structure of an athlete, characterized by a constant desire to improve, seeking perfection in all areas related to performance: optimizing his personal training, optimizing rest, optimizing understanding of the game, optimizing of his diet, etc. He even optimizes his way of managing his emotions, he tries to improve, to be a better version of him and that is the main reason that explains how he survives the injury he got and how he now I’d tell you there’s no secret, it’s the way of being that Dani has”.
What it tells me about dealing with emotions is interesting.

Dani has a very high ability to overcome adversity, but we have worked on this ability even more since the injury. You have learned to focus on what you can control, to understand that there are processes that you have no control over and that you should not pay attention to. He has worked a lot in management and focused on day-to-day work. That makes him a much stronger athlete mentally. Faced with setbacks such as ‘I’m not playing’, he has focused on what is under his control, which is training well, getting better, focusing on his habits and enjoying himself.
In that constant improvement you talk about, leading you to perfection, what has changed in your personal training?

“Since I started working with Dani three seasons ago, I would like to tell you that nothing has changed and a lot of things have changed. In other words, nothing has changed in the sense that we continue our training, eating, eating habits achievements but obviously they adapt to the situation we are in. We incorporate these issues into our daily life we ​​incorporate new habits but we can’t really say that anything has changed we adapt it simple to the moment we’re in and the need we have to cover I would tell you that given the perspective of these three years I think Dani arrived at the Olympics in optimal shape and injury was a critical point that took us a long time to recover and get that sense of normality back Especially this season Dani is already starting with a sense of normality, biomechanics totally free of discomfort, unchanged by the injury, that’s the key point. Let’s say Dani starts this season with a normal situation and that allows us to get to this part of the season under these circumstances. That’s why I tell you that nothing has changed in his personal training. A series of habits are incorporated into his life that had not been done before, a way of training that we vary depending on the moment”.
Speaking of habits, but what are they?

“Dani has made changes in his life that he didn’t have before and now they’re habits. If you follow him for 24 hours, you’ll see a lot of things that grab your attention, but are already normal to him. Dani has understood that 24 hours a day day they make sense regarding his profession, when he gets up he already has his hydration protocol, in the sports city he focuses on his performance, then mobility work, his food, it’s a complete protocol and when he leaves the sports city continues with it. Even his spare time is programmed. Examples, the schedules of dreams, the rest has improved it a lot. And everything is achieved through his personality”.
There is something that caught my attention and it was pre-season training, which was very demanding.

“Yes, we wanted to do special work during the holiday period. We were coming off a season marked by injury recovery and we wanted to take advantage of this period between seasons to generate work that would allow us to better enter the team’s pre-season.” dynamic and higher levels of adaptation to football and that was what we did in pre-season also because there was already a calendar in place at the club, which has its own pre-season, with great demand in terms of volume, intensity, training, and they quickly became addicted to the competition, so that was the change we made, to give special importance and more training volume between seasons”.
What did it actually consist of? We saw him climb many hills.

“We did an altitude stay and then a sea level stay, we split the training period in two. The first phase was at altitude and we did those slopes that you saw in the Sierra Nevada”.
And as for food, what’s it like?

“We do it based on analytical control and your preferences. We all have preferences in terms of food, or tastes, and we adjust your nutrition and your supplementation. We also take into account the time of the season and play with the situation of the week Even if it’s a game day, if there are two working sessions, if it’s after the game, etc. That’s fundamental”.
Finally, individual work outside of group training, how is that?

“At this level, with a player like Dani, the work doesn’t stop in the sports city, the player spends the rest of the day recovering, preventing injuries and optimizing aspects of specific performance. Yes, there is work with different objectives depending on when you are in and every afternoon there are things to do so yes I work in the afternoon with different objectives”.