Monthly Archive for October, 2020

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LeBron, Hamilton e Nadal: the witnesses of a mindset great change

LeBron James, Lewis Hamilton and Rafa Nadal, three different sports, all winners yesterday in the NBA championship, Formula 1 and tennis. They are the witnesses of how much the athletes’ careers have changed and how this diversity is the most evident example of how much the perception of age and the concept of health and well-being has changed today and how the concept of old age has changed radically. Many people today are aware of this change and live this new approach to their lives on a daily basis. All this is also thanks to the successes of these planetary champions

Our words show what we think about the athletes

Talking reveals the conception that people have of their listeners, in the case of coaches it reveals their attitude towards athletes.
It is obviously not a matter of grammatical knowledge but of a way of expressing oneself in which the accent is placed on the athletes highlighting their passive conception by the coach. As if they are people who change in reaction to the stimulus (the coach’s words) and not as active agents of their own improvement.

In fact it is frequent to hear sentences of this type (I don’t know if these translations are right, because I suppose there are slang sentences expressing better the passive conception of the athletes):

  • You have to motivate the athletes
  • Training must go to improve athletes’ skills
  • It’s clear that this one immediately breaks down
  • Stimulating them makes them mentally engaged
  • When I go to do visualize my athlete

These statements are just some of the many that I hear expressed on the fields and that describe the coach as a kind of magician who changes people. This attitude reveals a conception of the athlete as the one who must react and the coach as the trainer of people who cannot improve without such guidance style.

Have you ever thought about the words you use? And the effect they have on the athletes you train? Are you working to increases the athletes’ awareness and self-determination?

Sport is a right for all

E’ veramente sconcertante assistere alle polemiche nate dalla dichiarazione di Roberto Mancini, ct della nazionale di calcio, per avere affermato che bisogna pensare prima di parlare e che lo sport è un diritto come la scuola e il lavoro. Aggiungerei anche che bisogna conoscere prima di parlare.

Bisogna sapere ad esempio che la sedentarietà è la quarta causa di morte e che secondo quanto documentato dalla rivista Lancet, nel nostro Paese i costi diretti di questa inattività motoria sono 906.680.000 milioni di dollari (di cui 707.210.000 a carico del sistema sanitario, 32.267.000 dei privati e 163.202.000 sostenuti dalle famiglie) mentre quelli indiretti sono 498.021.000.  Sono cifre enormi che dovrebbero obbligare la politica italiana a valutare appieno il valore dello sport. Chi ne ha la diretta responsabilità deve essere pienamente consapevole che la mancanza di attività fisica e di sport è ancora oggi un problema misconosciuto, altrettanto grave come lo sono le malattie cardiovascolari, il diabete, il cancro al seno e al colon e richiede un’azione globale a breve e a lungo termine, se non per amore di una buona salute dei cittadini almeno per ragioni di buona economia.

Va aggiunto che lo sport non è una questione collegata alla richiesta di pochi che vogliono svagarsi e a cui è stato sottratto un gioco ma rappresenta il modo per mantenere uno stile di vita fisicamente attivo e sviluppare il benessere individuale e della comunità.

A questo riguardo la sua centralità è stata ribadita da un Memorandum d’intesa firmato a maggio tra il Comitato olimpico internazionale (CIO) e l’Organizzazione mondiale della sanità (OMS), incentrato sulla promozione e la difesa della salute attraverso lo sport e l’attività fisica durante questo periodo.

Inoltre, se volgiamo la nostra attenzione ai giovani in età scolare e a quelli con disabilità è evidente che l’accesso allo sport non deve diventare un ulteriore modo per discriminare alcuni rispetto ad altri. Così come lo è già stato lo scorso anno scolastico per molti studenti, e le loro famiglie, la difficoltà di accesso a internet e il non possedere almeno un computer per seguire le lezioni da casa.

The 3 pillars of my job

These the 3 pillars of my work.

  1. “What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning” (Bloom, 1985).
  2. Performance is not a theoretical construct but a measurement: each observed score (Performance) on a measurement is equal to the true score (Skills) corrected for the error (deviation of the observed score from the true score or deviation of Performance from Skills). Performance = Skill + Error (Aoyagi, Cohen, Poczwardowski, Metzler and Statler, 2018).
  3. You must accept the error, rather than consider it as something to avoid, because it will always be present in every performance. You must learn to reduce its frequency and severity, to maintain the effectiveness of the performance at the highest level of personal competence. It is necessary to allow mistakes to be made, in order to obtain the information that will be useful to improve/upgrade skills, increasing the probability of providing performance in the future more and more corresponding to the level of skill acquired (Dweck, 2006).

 

Self-Efficacy and observation

In this period many interventions with the coaches that I am doing concern the use of observation as a system to improve their teaching during the sessions and their relationships with the athletes.
Albert Bandura’s model is an approach that can allow to apply one of the most widespread theories in psychology and that refers to the belief of a person to be able to successfully face a certain competition situation or even to obtain a specific improvement in a technical skill.
The theory of self-efficacy is based on four fundamental ideas to which the coach can refer to to promote the athlete’s improvement.

Past experiences - It has been shown that an indispensable source of self-efficacy lies in relying on past experiences of success in relation to a task.On this basis, the coach should therefore always link what needs to be done at that time (speaking of course of challenging and significant tasks) by linking this his communication to what has happened before, so as to always connect the past with the present.
Vicarious experiences - We refer to the concept of modeling, observing companions who follow a certain task and also their fatigue is an excellent stimulus to increase the belief in success. It is not difficult in any sport to build such situations in rotation among the athletes.
Social support - we know the importance of supporting commitment and supporting people after a mistake. We always put as first goal the development of the person and then the technical acquisition or the sport result. It is important that the coach explains “why” and not just “how to do”, learning and performance will improve because the athlete will feel that he or she is interested in the development of his or her psychological autonomy.
Physiological and emotional condition - Just remember that the warm-up is the type of activity allowing to achieve a physical and psychological condition of readiness, putting the individual in the condition of being ready. This applies not only to the beginning of the training effectively but also to prepare for the most significant exercises of each training session.

Football together per young with intellectual disabilities

Calcio Insieme continues for the 6th year its program of teaching soccer to children and adolescents, girls and boys, with intellectual disorders. 80 young people will train twice a week followed by a staff of coaches, sports psychologists, speech therapists and doctors. Today we start with the training of coaches, tonight online and tomorrow on the pitch.