The heretic sport regards the kind of performances that we will never see at the Olympics but that require a similar skill level and dedication. Watch this video.
Monthly Archive for September, 2014
The school is started and many parents worried about school performances often cut sport. Football is one of them. Workouts jumping and sport abandoned if the scool results are bad. Physical activity is considered a premium and therefore is used as punishment.
The latin sentence “Mens sana in corpore sano” contains a deep truth that becomes even more realistic if associated with childhood and adolescence. Accustom your child to an adequate management of the school and the sport times is the winning educational strategy that focuses on the sense of responsibility, stimulating the organizational skills of the young. The desire to be on time for the training stimulates to organize, to pull out the management skills. It’s important for parents to learn how to use the wishes of children and young people as a stimulus and not as a source of punishment, this in order to achieve stable results not associated with the punitive moment.
The World Health Organization too in the “Global Recommendations on Physical Activity” defines for each age group the quantity of physical activity recommended. Between 5 and 17 years is recommended that: “at least 60 minutes a day of moderate-to-vigorous activity, including at least 3 times a week strength exercises that may consist of movement games or sports activities.”
This interest in physical activity during childhood and adolescence confirms the importance of sport for the physical and psychological growth of the new generations. The first step is to stop to consider sport as a whim of the children, to be used as a reward or punishment, but a key aspect to be integrated in the educational development of the young.
(by Daniela Sepio)
The coach of the All Blacks recently said at a conference that the warrior mentality of his players is based on the balance betweeny braver and humility: to be able to do extraordinary things but also recover quickly from mistakes, knowing how to quickly raise and win.
This skill distinguishes the from top athletes from the other talented athletes. Examples are:
Roger Federer changing is playing style to continue to remain at his level by compensating the physical limits with an increase of the effectiveness of the service and with more frequent descents to the net. Change to reduce the limits and win.
Valentino Rossi this year returned to win at MotoGP after a long time, setting the record for oldest winner, he has not given up this opportunity and at the end he succeeded.
Tiger Woods from 60th in the world rankings instead retire in three years he returned to be #1
Giovanni Pellielo lost the London Olympics but the following year he won the world championship and he has already qualified for the Rio
Learn from them! Not just the talent it takes courage and humility.
Credit: George Retseck; Source: Barry M. Popkin University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
“Overweight and obesity were estimated to afflict nearly 1.5 billion adults worldwide in 2008. One estimate, based on data our analysis of new data shows is an undercount, predicted in 2030 globally an estimated 2.16 billion adults will be overweight, and 1.12 billion will be obese.”
“If we stop to define each other for what we are not and start to define ourselves for what we are, we can all be free, this is what HeForShe is about. It’s about freedom.”
In any company that wants to be competitive the selection of personnel is one of the essential elements that the management should design and implement in an accurate and competent way. The selection of the right people to put in the right places is one of the keys to the success of any company. Phil Jackson, coach of 9 NBA championships, has always sustained that the difference between a good team and a great team is the toughness and will to win of each player. This is true for any team in business as in sports. In this approach there is an exception, however, carried out by most of the Italian professional soccer teams. In fact, in these years the players that are chosen by the clubs are often players who are not able to represent in a field added value. They are also foreigners (only 84 new in this new season) reducing the access to young Italian players in the teams. The damage created is very serious. Hindering by the fact the young Italians to play, the young activities become useless because the best will not find teams willing to integrate themselves in the team. Furthermore, clubs spend money unnecessarily for foreign players who are not of value, the team loses further value because cannot rely on players who want to win. There are no logical explanations allowing us to understand this phenomenon so negative for the clubs. I do not know if this will serve to cover financial assets that enable tax evasion. Certainly the professionalism of the managers of football is defeated by this approach and the fact that this practice is so widespread evidently not worried indeed it emerges strengthened.
When coaches train adolescent athletes t they need to use their interpersonal skills efficiently. The communication style more frequently adopted is to “be a friend.” In fact, even when the boys and girls grow up, the true challenge for the coaches is to maintain their role. The coach-friend does not help,the coaches need to apply some rules, useful also for parents, which allow them to have an open communication with the teenagers:
- Stimulate active participation to facilitate the processes of attention and memory: give examples
- Understanding the needs of the listeners. The motivation to listen is essential: which messages are more interesting for them
- Search for the adolescent feedback. There can be no communication without information exchange: the feedback is, therefore, an essential step in this process
- Create togetherness
- Follow their own pace. They are used to deal with messages having these characteristics: speed, motion, color, sound, interactivity. Coach messages need to have some of these features otherwise attention and the motivation to listen will decrease
- Use their jargon
- Use different channels to communicate (visual, auditory, kinesthetic)
- To be concrete without to overload of information
At the same time there are attitudes that, in contrast, are able to stop any possibility of communication with the adolescents:
- The excess of information
- Giving feedback and negative feedback without pointing the way for change
- Have an attitude of superiority: “I’m older and I know how things are going”
- Maintain a physical and psychological distance
- Have a manipulating and controlling leadership style
Communicating with young people is really a challenge. Often we remain displaced in front of their questions or their silences. They have the ability to move a lot of deep feelings that we must recognized and processed in order to continue to improve in our own role as a coach.
(by Daniela Sepio)
Some athletes have responded to the blog I wrote about the need to be the best fan of ourselves, saying that it’s really hard to do it, because the mistakes as are the negative performances too harshly test this belief. I agree and in fact I consider the self-confidence as the culmination of a process of psychological maturation and certainly not the starting point. This does not mean that we have not to do everything must be done to become self-confident, without which we cannot sustain the commitment needed in sport, school or job. Who wants to excel must be prepared to strongly support the commitment through any kind of difficulty. In this sense, we can say that the hard engagement must become a lifestyle, not something to show only when all goes well. In fact, we should know that we must be prepared to spend more hours than that in the beginning we had planned.
But how hard it’s to be the best fan of ourselves! An athlete should show this belief toward him/herself and instead it’s one of the hardest things to do. A few examples:
- A girl says to me “I did four races this year and none went well … then I’ll stop I cannot continue to do well only in training.”
- A boy says to me “I was competing well then I thought that I could not continue in this way and so I made some mistakes and I did not get into the final.”
- Another boy at the world championships before the final “This time I have to take a medal.” It came in fourth.
- A girl “this time I lose bad, I did not believe in myself.”
Each of them has been working as a professional athlete, it’s their main activity, it’s that one in which they want to have success in life. On these occasions they have not proved to be the best fans of themselves. Competitive sport requires a high level of self-confidence and recklessness to know that the next time will be better than this one. This awareness comes from the engagement in training, to know that it is true that 1, 2, 3 0 multiple times I will lose, but it does not matter because continuing in this way the results will come. The important thing is to continue to sustain ourselves, especially when things go wrong. In summary sit needs:
- Total commitment in training
- Total support in the race regardless of the results
- Confident expectation of good results
Some football schools have already opened their sporting year while others will open this week. I hope that more and more clubs have welcomed the sport psychologist in their staff, appreciating the added value provided by a skilled professional.
Listening to some of my colleagues I find that often the coaches are the main obstacle to work in a club. They areworried about losing their central role, but often it happens that even if there is the psychologist, the coaches do not know what to ask and how to be helped.
I have always believed in the integration of various professionals in every sporting and in particular football schools. Here are interwoven so many different aspects, involving the technical, physical and psychological growth of the young and for this reason, the integration of different professional skills becomes essential.
I asked a football expert with whom I worked for many years, to make a list of things you asked me and those who, with his experience of integrated work with the psychologist may suggest to ask . I publish it to share with psychologists and coaches the point of view of a coach who has learned to use the opportunity given by “teamwork”.
What ask the coach to the sport psychologist
- How to facilitate understanding
- How to get more attention
- How to manage misbehavior
- How to manage group conflicts
- How to motivate
- How to provide adequate models
- How to deal with inappropriate behaviors / inadequate; comparisons with other teams
- How to reinforce / reward adequately
- What teaching method to use and how to put it into practice
- How to correct misbehavior without to punish
(by Daniela Sepio)
