Monthly Archive for July, 2016
In this photo by Slovakian photographer Mária Švarbová, the municipal swimming pool becomes a place of eerie, high-tensile beauty. 
Athletes and especially teenagers commit more to learn those skills that they feel are important for the coach.
True. This concept refers to those questions which relate, for example, the distraction of the athletes, the difficulty to remain concentrated or anxiety management. Often coaches can only respond to these needs by saying your guys to stay focused or calm down. So little useful answers and they leave the athletes only faced their difficulties. They usually do not teach to take a deep breath or to use ideomotor training as mental techniques to reduce stress and be active and proactive. These types of intervention are also described on the methodology of books (Weineck, 2001) but are rarely considered. As a result the athletes are not using the mind for the reason that their coaches do not teach them, because they do not consider this effort useful.
The coaches teach athletes to accept mistakes.
False. Coaches frequently speak of this need but rarely take the time in training to teach it. This is not a teaching strategy to say to a young “you did wrong, do not worry, go ahead and focused on what you need to do.” Because the athletes are instead worried, continue to think to the mistake committed and they lose the focus on what they should do. The coaches often think: “I do not know what to tell them, they know that for me is not a problem if they make mistakes, I just want they stay focused on the next action.” Athletes do not change and do not improve by applying pre-established sentences: if you are agitated, is calm; If you are distracted, concentrated; if you’re depressed, think positively. We must instead train to react positively to the errors. In tennis, for instance, if in a game there are 200 points, the winning goes the player who makes less mistakes than the other. In this case, it could win the game by making 90 mistakes, therefore to accept this amount of mistakes is crucial if the player want to succeed. The tennis coaches who are always ready to provide technical instructions in training as a result of one mistake, blocking the game and providing explanations, rarely behave in the same manner as a result of mental mistakes. For example, if a player at the end of one point hastens the serve timing execution he/she is never stopped to bring it back to the timing of proper execution. In other words, almost exclusively coaches train the technique or the tactique and rarely the behavioral reactions, teaching to stop those harmful and stimulating those useful in the game.
The coaches think that being focused is a matter that primarily concerns the athletes and devote little time to the development of this skill.
True. The ideomotor training or visualization is a concentration technique which consists in the repetition of the sport gesture as if you were running at that moment. Early research in this area date back to the 50s, and in 1984 Richard Frester published a survey on this subject in a German Journal (Medizin und Sport, 4) from which it emerged the utility in the following exercise phases:
1. Technical education of the individual elements of the movement and global exercises, in sports in which are required cyclic and acyclic movements.
2. Training of individual movement parameters such as the sense of rhythm, time, and frequency.
3. Correction of incorrect motor processes and to break motor stereotypes.
4. To promote or support a maintenance effect of the movements … Particularly suitable in the active recovery phases.
5. Preparation of the race. The visualization facilitates concentration on the movements and the realization of what as been planned.
In Italy we puts too much emphasis on the importance of victory on 12 years old kids and this is an opinion shared by many coaches, so our athletes arrive to 18 years who are physically and mentally exhausted.
True. Coaches want to jump the stages of athlete development as a long-term process to obtain sports results, they have no meaning other than to glorify coaches, federations and parents and leading the students to believe that they will have a successful future. These beliefs go against any scientific data, now available to everyone on the internet, but they are ignored by most of the sports organizations. It’s a phenomenon widespread in the world, that one of the early exploitation of young athletes who for years has been widely denounced in all Anglo-Saxon countries but continues to persist.
It’s widely believed that the athletes who show technical, tactical and physical fitness should be in optimum condition to compete at their best.
False. I know Olympian athletes that they are no longer get up by a defeat at the following Olympics. Gold medalists that in the next four years there were no longer expressed at that level, or others who have repeatedly come to the Games with the title of world champion and have never reached the final. Maybe they were not fit or had lost their technique? I understand that it’s difficult for those who teach sport be convinced that even if technical and fitness are essential to feel like a F1 Ferrari , then serves the pilot (the mind) without whom all the other things are useless. Coaches must be convinced of their psychological role, and the need to acquire the professional skills necessary to also carry out this function. It’s clear that if you rely only on the few hours of theoretical sports psychology present in official training courses, it will be very difficult to perform this motivational function that athletes need.
