You win or lose by “nothing”: how do you train it?

In sports the final score that distinguishes winners from losers is often very small. I’m not just referring to soccer where one team wins by the difference of one goal. It’s no coincidence that Mourinho says he is happier when his team wins 1-0 rather than 5-0, because that victory is synonymous with tenacity and concentration.

Sport teaches everyone a lot, because we lose by a point, by a handful of hundredths of a second, by an inch. In golf, the ball often misses the hole by a few millimeters, and the same is true in shooting, where Campriani explained to us that the difference between an 8 and a 10 is equivalent to three one-cent coins stacked on top of each other. In Al Pacino’s famous speech to the team in the locker room, in the movie Any Given Sunday, the coach states that we win or lose by an inch and that the sum of all the inches won or lost in a game will make the difference between living or dying.

This reasoning should certainly not distress you.

  1. It is the usual condition that all athletes face in competition; the conditions are the same for everyone.
  2. Sport requires extreme attention with the aim of encouraging the flow of one’s technical action and self-control.
  3. For how long? Until the end. Let’s forget that it is easier to maintain concentration if the race lasts a few seconds as in the 100m rather than two hours as in tennis. Tenacity is the necessary ingredient of a winning performance and is the result of the intensity with which you train and when you are oriented to react psychologically after a mistake.

Question: how much are your athletes trained in this and how much are you as coaches aware of the relevance and trainability of these three factors?

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