inside excellent life
Fight against online hatred, in particular the messages that mask homophobia, lesbophobia, transphobia, bifobia with the veil of irony: this is the goal of the social campaign “Don’t make people laugh” (“Non fa ridere”) that Arcigay launches within the European project Accept created with Bruno Kessler Foundation.
It is not enough said that sports, but not only them, should arouse high levels of physical and mental activation and be perceived as pleasant.
We know that many people are stimulate even through the feelings of anger and anxiety, I would say, however, that are not wellness-oriented and positive to teach the young athletes. Even the sports professionals (athletes of international level) have to learn to manage difficult times and competitive pressure with the same approach, taking pleasure and not suffering from their activities. What does it mean to be an athlete of the highest level and live performances with fear/anger and a feeling of unpleasantness.
How many of those who say that sports psychology is not founded on scientific grounds and continue to use only their psychological common sense or what they consider valid for themselves to train athletes.
How many managers, coaches, athletes and parents choose a mental training program provided by a motivator or a mental coach who does not have a degree in psychology because what matters is “making the athletes get the balls out” motivating them with barracks sentences.
Those who think that the psychologist is for the weak, it is for those who need a pat on the back and someone to complain about.
I want to let everyone know that there are 12 international scientific journals in the world publishing every year the results of research conducted in this field of psychology in all the universities of the world, providing a huge contribution to the knowledge and development of mental training systems and athletes development.
Remember that you can’t say I didn’t know.
The NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, said “many of the league’s players, who have an average salary of $7m a year, were “truly unhappy … The outside world sees the fame, the money, all the trappings that go with it, and they say: ‘How is it possible they even can be complaining?’ But a lot of these young men are genuinely unhappy.”
The NBA All-Star Isaiah Thomas once told him that “championships are won on the bus” with the players having greater camaraderie – and fewer headphones – but times have changed. Indeed one superstar had recently told Silver that from getting off a plane to a game to showing up in the arena he sometimes did not see a single person: ‘I am going to get to my room, stay in my room, get room service and go to the game Sunday,’” Silver said. “He knew if he said it publicly people would say ‘poor baby’.
One study of 50 swimmers competing for positions in Canada’s Olympic and world championship teams, for instance, found that before competition, 68% of them “met the criteria for a major depressive episode”.
The research, published in 2013, also found that the incidence of depression doubled among the elite top 25% of athletes. The authors noted: “The findings suggest that the prevalence of depression among elite athletes is higher than what has been previously reported in the literature.”
Subsequent studies among Australian and French elite athletes have also shown that the prevalence of common mental disorders (CMDs) – such as stress, anxiety and depression– ranged from 17% to 45% of the athletes studied.
Football is no different. A 2017 study of CMDs among 384 European professional football players found that 37% had symptoms of anxiety or depression at some point over a 12-month period. According to the researchers, a professional football team typically drawn from a squad of 25 players can “expect symptoms of CMD to occur among at least three players in one season”.
Tellingly the authors of another study – among footballers in five European leagues – suggested that mental health issues might be higher compared with the rest of the population but pointedly added: “We would like to emphasise how difficult it is to gather scientific information about mental health in professional football, since such a topic remains a kind of taboo.”
Of course elite sport is brutal. Failure is common, career development uncertain. And injuries, overtraining and concussions can also affect mental health. But speaking on Friday, Silver also suggested that an additional factor these days is social media.
So what should be done? Scientists writing recently in the International Society of Sport Psychology journal stressed that the need for athlete and coach education was paramount in removing stigmatisation around the issue and “to expeditiously help when mild subclinical issues are experienced before these issues become mental illness”.
Some have gone public with their issues, including the Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love, who spoke about a panic attack he experienced on court. As he put it: “Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act. You learn what it takes to ‘be a man’. It’s like a playbook: Be strong. Don’t talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own. So for 29 years, I thought about mental health as someone else’s problem.
“I know you don’t just get rid of problems by talking about them but I’ve learned that maybe you can better understand them and make them more manageable.”
It surely helps, too, that Silver is on the front foot and in his players’ corner, driving the debate on such an important issue.
Other leaders world sports would be wise to follow his lead.
The idea that sport is a fundamental activity to develop the motor and psychosocial skills of people with intellectual disabilities is becoming increasingly widespread and it is important to start practicing it since childhood.
Furthermore, sport involvement should permit the integration between young people with intellectual disabilities and peers with typical development, improve people’s overall well-being and allow families to live positive experiences and feel part of a community, the sports community, which values their children regardless of their difficulties.
Realizing these goals requires:
In short, we need to get out of the concept of “doing good” and get in the mentality of “doing it well”. We must be aware that attributing to external problems the difficulty of “doing good” (poor economic resources, poor preparation of the operators, taking as a basic idea that doing something is better than doing nothing) is just an excuse to hide our difficulties to achieve an effective service.
On the contrary, some rules direct the quality of a project:
If your athletes commit any of these mistakes, it means that you have not taught them to give value at their commitment in training:
Orlando Pizzolato, in the latest issue of the Italian journal Correre, writes the coach must go beyond the usual act, overcoming the mental myopia that leads to accept passively the training rules and its applications. We should instead call into question our own ideas opening the mind to new solutions.
I agree with this goal because as I wrote in my book “Training to win”:
“train does not mean teach a technique and an athlete does not only practices sport techniques, although it may be complex and requiring a high level of competence. Coaching means to use cognitive, emotional and motor skills to teach/learn to know and to do what needs to be done to achieve optimal performance levels. Of course, in each sport the technical movement is the visible component of the sport performance, but there is much more behind the excellent performances, because running an almost perfect action requires an optimal level of technical mastery, control and fitness all expressed in mental actions. Behind these actions there is therefore the overall ability of the athlete:
Elite athletes also know master seemingly opposite conditions such as, for example, be accurate and fast, stable and flexible, responsive and reflective.
