inside excellent life
All things originate in the mind. Actions and events depend heavily on motivation. Appreciation of humanity, compassion and love are key points. If we develop a good heart, whether our field is science, agriculture or politics, since motivation is so crucial, they’ll all improve.
Dalai Lama
Knowing the kind of shot you want to hit and committing to that shot is just as important as the swing that makes the shot.
If you don’t have a ball flight and landing in mind, you’re simply hitting and hoping.
In baseball, mental coaches were once seen as for the ‘weak-minded.’ Now they’re essential.
It’s amazing for me how easy it would be to change our socially oriented sedentary lifestyle. Others, in this case in United Kingdom are developing a different culture and try to change it to a socially oriented wellness lifestyle that comes from the movement.
Rene Meulensteen was a key member of Sir Alex Ferguson’s first-team staff at Manchester United for six years. Here he talks about Ferguson’s leadership style
Vision
The ultimate aim was to win, but Sir Alex wanted to win in a certain style. I can remember him bringing me into his office when he’d made me first-team coach. He had a flipchart and said, ‘listen, Ren – I don’t need to talk to you about how to run your sessions, you know all that. But I’d like to reiterate what I want to see. Possession is important, but always possession with a purpose. When we attack I want to see pace, power, penetration and unpredictability. These are the four things you must instil in the team in every single training session.’
And he was always a big advocate of youth. That meant investing in youth facilities and policies, but also giving opportunities. If ever he had chance to bring a homegrown player into the first team, he would do it.
Delegating
The manager achieved the highest level of management – he delegated. He was overseeing it all, he always stayed in control, but he gave us the freedom to do our jobs as well as we could.
Creating the right environment
There was something else, which I only really realised afterwards: not once did I ever feel any level of pressure, not in the six years I worked for him. I never felt ‘I’m under the cosh here’ or ‘the manager’s not happy with this’. That takes top-drawer management, to make everyone feel that comfortable. We had some tough moments but never got carried away. We were able to very quickly see it in perspective and move on.
Always adapting
Things change … He had this ability to adapt and evolve, which is rare, maybe unique, when you think how long he had been there and how much success he had had.
Being decisive
If a difficult decision had to be made, he would make it … He was never afraid to make the big calls.
Belief
He always said, ‘our approach is 75/25 -75% about us, 25% about the opposition. Because we are Man United.’ It was about always reinforcing how good we were, how strong we were.
Humour
The key to working with such high-profile players is to inform and facilitate. In training, you’re not telling them every step they should make, you’re showing them the options. You back it up with video footage – ‘this is what I talked to you about, this is what I meant’. And you let them evolve it.
If one thing stands out from my time at Man United it was the amount of laughs we had. We laughed every single day. Sir Alex had an unbelievable sense of humour.
A new report, produced by Sheffield Hallam University, ukactive and DataHub, argues something health industry professionals have long known to be true – that people should become more active as they age, not less.
Reimagining Ageing, released at the ukactive National Summit in September, says older people’s lives are being cut short by inactivity and paints a compelling picture of how the cost of not tackling this challenge could threaten the NHS.
A few key facts: by 2030 the number of people in the UK aged 60 or over will hit 20 million – up 31 per cent from today’s figure of 15.3 million.
“Our population is ageing fast, with a proliferation of health problems. It has long been assumed such problems were directly caused by ageing, and could, therefore, be neither prevented nor treated,” says Sir Muir Gray, formerly chief knowledge officer for the NHS.
“However, we have clear evidence that ageing by itself is not a cause of major health problems until people are in their mid-90s. In fact, the problems we’ve ascribed to ageing are due to disease – much of it preventable – such as loss of fitness and negative attitudes to growing older.
“The loss of function and resilience we’ve assumed to be the result of ageing can, in fact, be influenced principally by activity: physical, mental and social,” he says.
Getting our ageing population active will require a ‘cultural transformation’ of the perceptions we have towards ageing. As a sector, we must be prepared with the facilities, products, services, programmes and expertise required to meet the demands of an older population.
“We need to inspire a shift in how we approach our ageing years, with a major emphasis on building physical activity in at every step, to ensure long lives are also healthy lives,” says ukactive CEO Steven Ward. “The phrase ‘put your feet up’ is one of the most dangerous in the English language.”
The report calls for whole-society collaborations to create active environments via accessible community facilities, to embed physical activity promotion into the healthcare system and to harness new technology to make activity and exercise the natural choice for older people.
ukactive believes that one solution is Wellness Hubs, where physical activity facilities sit alongside local services such as libraries, police stations and GP surgeries, creating a single community focal-point that offers inclusive, welcoming and holistic physical activity experiences for a broad range of people. Evidence from existing Wellness Hubs has shown a positive impact on local communities, particularly among older populations.
“In the NFL they got a bunch of old white men owning teams and they got that slave mentality,” James said. “And it’s like, ‘This is my team. You do what the f— I tell y’all to do. Or we get rid of y’all.’ ”
“I’m so appreciative in our league of our commissioner [Adam Silver], … He doesn’t mind us having … a real feeling and to be able to express that. It doesn’t even matter if Adam agrees with what we are saying, he at least wants to hear us out. As long as we are doing it in a very educational, non-violent way, then he’s absolutely okay with it.”
“I am very educated about what I believe in and I’m not doing it in a violent way,” James said. “I’m not knocking on your door saying, ‘Listen, I’m kneeling today and if you don’t kneel with me, I’ll knock you the f– out.’ But you know people go crazy when things are done outside the box. People don’t know how to react.”
“The English Institute of Sport (EIS) has distributed gift packs to World Class Programme athletes containing health advice and illness prevention products to help them stay healthy over the festive period.
Funded summer and winter sports who registered their interest have received the packs to help athletes fight off winter germs.
Elite athletes are four times more likely to fall ill over the holiday season, which may be due to a break from training; a slight relaxation of nutrition, hand hygiene and training routine; alongside an increase in social events and exposure to germs. This can then affect an athlete’s availability for full training in January.”
“EIS Senior Sports Physician Anita Biswas has been leading the project. She said: “It is important for athletes to enjoy the holidays but in previous years we have seen many athletes returning after the break having been ill and often with ongoing illness.”
