El Shaarawy crisis

It’s still continuing the Stephan El Shaarawy’s crisis, Milan football player, after a good first half of the season, he played a rather subdued the second part and this crisis seems to continue in the national team. Crisis are quite common in young players and, maybe future champions, as it is not easy to maintain high performance levels when everyone expects it to be so.

Many athletes feel these emotions and should have to follow a program of psychological coaching to train mentally to handle them effectively. I hope that Prandelli, the Italian team coach, is not one of those coaches that says “do not worry, as soon as you score a goal all these thinks get out.”

The main training mode are the following:

• Relaxation associated with mental rehearsal of the performance – it’s about knowing how to relax reducing usefulness tensions and charging with those who promote the performance.
• Identification of the optimal emotional state – Allows the player to train himself to stay in the optimal psychological condition, experienced in the past on the occasion of his best performances.
• Simulation – Replicate the match conditions in training helps to improve  the performance and prepare for the unexpected situations that may occur. Consists, for example, in producing in training stimuli that may distract the athlete from the execution of his performance.
• Acceptance of competitive stress – It’s essential to accept that the emotional condition felt before the game is an important individual reaction; it emphasizes the value that is attributed to that match. In fact, without the stress perception the matches would only other workouts. Instead, they are carried out to prove  to ourselves our competitive value through comparison with others.