Akash Bhatnagar creates record in single leg football juggles

Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh): Akash Bhatnagar from Ghaziabad has created a remarkable record in doing maximum single leg football juggles performed in 30 seconds. His name has been included in the India Book of Records (IBR).

Akash Bhatnagar (born on February 20, 2000) is also titled as ‘Grand Master’ in Asia Book of Records (ABR) for the same attempt. He performed 95 football juggles with his right leg in 30 seconds, as confirmed on September 09, 2020. Football juggles is one of the important techniques, practiced to develop the ball control during a football match. He wanted to help all the talented sportspersons through his sports NGO, who are facing problems in their respective career.

He said, “I am playing football for past 8 years and it took 6 months of continuous practice of football juggles to achieve this level. I had performed 182 juggles in 60 seconds, it means more than 3 juggles per second. Sunny Bhatnagar, my elder brother and a former International Jeet Kune Do player, helped me out to make my fitness level high to perform this record to my best.”

On asking what challenges did he faced while creating the record, he said that injuries were the biggest obstacles during the training sessions. To maintain fitness and game sense he had to play practice matches regularly without getting injured during entire training period. “While practicing single leg juggles, we have to develop muscle endurance, ball control and body balance. To get recovered from the training session, I can only practice football juggles two times a day and three days a week,” he added.

To make the highest juggles, he had to perform juggles with high frequency and less height in the juggles. In small height juggles he got fractions of second to find the center of the ball and take right energy touch on the ball to take next juggle. Most of the time ball lost its balance on last 5-6 seconds.

“My family was extremely happy and my grand mother was happy after seeing my photo in a newspaper. I was sports captain in my school days and Sports vice president in the college, so this achievement helped and inspired all my school and college mates, who were practicing since long to achieve their goals,” he said.

He further added, “Sfter facing many problems in my football career I started a Sports NGO (Sports Army Foundation) to help talented sportspersons. After achieving this record I was extremely happy and thought that now I can motivate and inspire so many athletes and help them to achieve their desired goals. We always have various ways to reach the destination and we just have to look around to reach where we have to go.”