The complexieties to work with professional teams

Published on February 19, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: .

About – International Society of Sport Psychology

DATE: Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024 Speakers: Dr. Gloria Balague Length of Session: 90 minutes (60-minute lecture, 30-minute Q&A) Language: English (Live captioning in English and other languages) Time: 12:00 UTC

(New York 8:00, Belo Horizonte, 9:00, London 13:00; Beijing 20:00, Taipei, 20:00, Seoul 21:00) Where: Zoom (Link sent upon registration)

Program Overview 

In this presentation, Dr. Balague will outline the essentials of providing sport psychology services to professional athletes, teams, and organizations. She will discuss how to gain entrance in these organizations and how to engage with the different stakeholders, such as management, coaches, medical staff, sport scientists, and athletes. Dr. Balague will highlight the importance of understanding coaches’ areas of interests/concerns and communication and coaching styles, and team strategies, as well as the value of building effective relationships with medical and sports science personnel, scouts, and equipment staff. Furthermore, Dr. Balague will delve into the core of her work with players and athletes, spanning from educational efforts to targeted interventions. Dr. Balague will share her expertise on the critical need to grasp the unique demands placed on athletes, their interactions with coaches, and their roles within the team. Dr. Balague will wrap up the presentation with a discussion around the organizational challenges and considerations associated with delivering sport psychology services in professional sport organizations, offering attendees a deep dive into the intricacies of successfully navigating this specialized area of work.

About our speaker 

Dr.Gloria Balague is a native of Barcelona, Spain. She is a Clinical Associate Professor Emerita in Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has worked extensively with USA Track & Field, USA Gymnastics and USA Field Hockey. Dr. Balague was at the 92 and 96 Olympics as sport psychologist. She has been the sport psychologist for the Chicago Bears from 2015-2020, and for the USA Rhythmic Gymnastics program from 2016 to 2023. 10 years ago, she joined Don Hellison in starting the TPSR Alliance (tpsr-alliance.org) a group aiming at using sport and physical activity as a tool to promote personal and social responsibility in youth. Dr. Balague was the first President of the Catalan Association of Sport Psychology, Past-President of Division 47 (Sport and Exercise Psychology) of the APA, and also of Division 12 (Sport Psychology) of the International Association of Applied Psychology, and in 2016 received the Outstanding Professional Practice Award from the Association of Applied Sport Psychology. Dr. Balague has imparted doctoral level courses in Sport Psychology in Spain, Argentina and Chile and advised doctoral dissertations in several countries.

Program Format Attendees can participate in an ISSP Master Class session right from their office or home. Registrants will be provided the Zoom link upon registration to access the presentation right on the web in real time. If you are unable to watch the session live, a recording will be provided afterward to all registrants.

REGISTER HERE 

 

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Malgioglio story with the brain-damaged children

Published on February 14, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: , .

If you have five minutes, read this article to the end. To know true greatness. (by PierLuigi Pinna on X, @pierpi13)

“Astutillo Malgioglio, known to friends as Tito, was the backup goalkeeper for Inter under Trapattoni, the team of the record-breaking league title. In 1987, I went to interview him for Il Giorno, the newspaper I was working for at the time, in Piacenza. I had heard that Malgioglio, then 29 years old, had opened a gym near his home for the motor rehabilitation of children with cerebral palsy. He named the facility ERA 77 (acronym for Elena, the name of his daughter born in 1977, Raffaella, his wife, and Astutillo) and, aided by his wife, provided this service for free, dedicating all his spare time to it.

I won an award in Como for this interview, presented to me by Pierluigi Marzorati, the basketball champion of Pallacanestro Cantù, which I immediately donated to UNICEF. Malgioglio told me beautiful and ugly things. True things.

He told me he had been doing all this for 7-8 years but quietly, almost incognito: because it wasn’t considered good, given the state of affairs in the world of football, for a professional footballer to be distracted with thoughts (or activities) deemed useless or bizarre, such as helping others. Unless one encountered two people like Nils Liedholm and Sven Goran Eriksson, as happened to Tito during his two years at Roma from ’83 to ’85, who convinced Dino Viola to make the Trigoria gym available to Malgioglio in his spare time, allowing him to do in Rome what he had started doing in Piacenza.

He told me that the Players’ Association, through its newspaper, had opened a subscription among all its members (the over one thousand players of Serie A, Serie B, Serie C1, and Serie C2) to raise funds for Tito’s activities, and in the end, the proceeds amounted to 700 thousand lire, which the AIC (Italian Footballers’ Association) somewhat embarrassedly arranged to give to him.

Above all, he told me that one day at the Pinetina training ground, Jurgen Klinsmann approached him and asked why, after training sessions, he always saw him rushing off to Piacenza so quickly. Tito explained why, and Klinsmann said to him: “Tomorrow I’ll come with you, I want to see with my own eyes what you do.” Klinsmann kept his promise. He got into Malgioglio’s beaten-up Beetle, went with him to Piacenza, and spent the entire afternoon watching Tito assist the children with cerebral palsy.

Then, before getting back into the Beetle to be driven back to Milan, he took out his checkbook and without saying a word wrote 70 million lire (seventy million), handed the check to his companion. He had tears in his eyes. Like those of Malgioglio”. [Paolo Ziliani da Il Fatto Quotidiano]

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Athletes need to know how to wait for the race to start

Published on February 12, 2024 in Generale. 0 Comments

Knowing how to wait is an important quality for every human. For an athlete or team, it means knowing how to wait for the moment when the competition begins. These waits are usually not experienced as short and easy moments. One would like to start right away but cannot and has to respect the start time that someone else has decided. In an age where with a click one can get an answer to any question, waiting stands on the other side of the continuum in which on one end there is “anything and everything now” and at the other end there is a time that is well defined but not that of the present, the here and now.

From the energy point of view, waiting implies knowing how to keep physical and mental energy intact for when the race begins. From that time and until the end of the competition one must expend it effectively. On the psychological side, waiting should serve to guide the mind on ideas unrelated to what is going to be done; athletes often listen to music, relax or read, to keep it in another world away from the race, and then have performance-related thoughts as the start time approaches.

Such an approach to the race puts athletes in a position to guide themselves effectively and enables them to reach what is known as the Individual Zone of Individual Functioning, which consists of knowing how to put oneself in the pray in the emotional condition one prefers.

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How to cope the more relevant matches

Published on February 11, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: .

Preparing to play important matches is not easy even if you are fit. Physical and technical-tactical preparation are indispensable but not sufficient factors.

In these moments, self-control is the factor to be activated the most. These are the hours when you have to show yourself and the whole team, that whatever the challenges will be in the match you will find the right solution. The focus must be on only what you have decided to do. There is nothing to invent, the answers are already there, at hand and to be implemented with decision and speed. Opponents experience the same condition of fear and stress; no one is immune.

For these reasons, the one who puts oppressive thoughts behind him or her and decides to live intensely every second of the game wins. So, let’s get ready to enter this competitive context. So many times we draw on the will and desire to deliver the best individual and team performance. Let’s do that now, too! Calm, pace and speed.

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Charles Coste is the oldest living Olympic champion

Published on February 9, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: .

Charles Coste, 100 years old, is the oldest living Olympic champion and will be a torchbearer at this summer’s Paris Olympics. He was born Feb. 8, 1924, in Ollioules, France, and at age 24, in 1948, he was selected for the first postwar Games. He was French pursuit champion and put off entering professional racing for a year in order to compete in the Olympics. “My club advised me to wait. They told me, ‘If you are an Olympic champion, you will be one for life.’”

As a professional he already won one of the biggest cycling competitions of the time in his first year: the Grand Prix des Nations, beating Fausto Coppi. He described himself by saying, “I was a rider but mostly a chaser. I raced every Sunday at the Vel d’Hiv, there were 15,000 people in the stands. For the road races it was the same, everywhere I went there was an incredible crowd.” Coste raced the Tour de France twice and the Giro d’Italia four times.

Charles Coste

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Are you a sport passionate?

Published on February 7, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: .

We often use words without stopping to understand their value. This is the case when we talk about passion. What do we mean when we say that we are passionate about something, that amateurs (nowadays more frequently called masters), for example, are passionate about swimming, running or cycling. That is, that I do the work I’ve always wanted to do.

Passion consists of a particularly strong motivation towards a well-defined activity, it is very useful to understand what drives to training, study or work. A survey conducted in 2019 had highlighted that 55% of Italians are satisfied with their work. satisfaction is at a lower level than passion although positive and determined by experiences evaluated as rewarding.

Passion emerges in those jobs that involve a certain degree of creativity and are perceived by those who perform them as more exciting, since they require autonomy, decision-making skills and divergent reasoning. Those who consider it necessary to introduce innovative factors into their professional experiences, as opposed to those who make more conservative choices, are certainly among those who perform work with passion. Athletes who have succeeded in turning their passion for their sport into a job fall into this category. Outside the work context, those who are engaged in activities driven by the pleasure they provide, from which they derive no gain or material recognition, are individuals turned to cultivating a passion.

Like any psychological dimension, passion can be interpreted in a constructive and pleasant way and in another more negative way, in this case we can talk about:

Harmonious passion, it is based on autonomous motives. pleasure and the feeling of mastery.
Obsessive passion, consists in feeling obliged or compensate for other aspects of the personality. Reduces concentration. Obstructs self-regulation.

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Children living near green spaces have stronger bones

Published on February 7, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Sleurs H, Silva AI, Bijnens EM, et al. Exposure to Residential Green Space and Bone Mineral Density in Young Children. JAMA Netw Open. 2024; 7(1): e2350214.

Bone mass, a composite of bone size and mineral density, is a key determinant of bone strength throughout life. Peak bone mass is achieved in early adulthood and depends on the bone mass accrual during skeletal growth and development. For this reason, suboptimal accrual at a young age is as crucial to the onset of osteoporosis as bone loss through aging.

Hence, targeted interventions on bone mass accrual at the early stages of life may decrease fracture and/or osteoporosis risk later in life. In addition to the influence exerted by genetic factors, early-life physiologic, lifestyle (eg, nutrition and physical activity), and environmental factors may also play an important role in bone mass accrual.

Several studies have reported the benefits of early-life green space exposure on neurocognitive and social-behavioral development,1as well as on the mental and emotional well-being of children. Moreover, higher green space exposure during childhood has also been associated with lower body mass index, reduced risk of overweight or obesity, lower blood pressure, and higher physical activity.

Despite increasing evidence about the health benefits of green space exposure, the available studies1on the association with bone mineral density are scarce. One large population-based, epidemiologic study reported that living in a greener area was associated with higher bone strength in adults, suggesting that residential exposure to greenness may positively influence bone health.

Conversely, a longitudinal study conducted among elderly citizens did not observe a protective effect of residential greenness on bone health. In this context, the aim of this study was to investigate the association between early-life exposure to residential surrounding green space and bone mineral density in children aged 4 to 6 years living in an affluent society.

Conclusions and Relevance  In this study of 1492 children aged 4 to 6 years, higher bone mineral density and a lower risk of having low bone density were associated with higher residential green space exposure during childhood. These findings highlight the importance of early-life exposure to residential green space on bone health during critical periods of growth and development, with long-term implications.

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Nothing is impossible

Published on February 6, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments

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Immerse ourselves with into the stress

Published on February 5, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments

It is often said, “Just focus on playing,” or “Concentrate on what you know how to do,” or even “Mistakes happen in the competition; the important thing is not to avoid mistakes but to refocus on the task.”

Of course, these phrases and many others are spoken to athletes who make sports their profession. They train for many hours every day, are coached by experienced trainers, and participate in international competitions with the intention of expressing themselves to the best of their abilities.

However, despite many efforts, it is difficult for everyone not to feel the tension that precedes the start of these important events. These are the occasions when these young individuals go all out, knowing that this is their opportunity. There will be others, but this one that is approaching is one of those.

They all know that they need to focus on the task at hand, the one they have prepared for. The issue, however, is that their entire sports and social world expects to see if they are truly as good as they are claimed to be, or for the more experienced, if they will repeat past performances.

It is not enough to know how to concentrate or to have experienced this stress condition several times in order to control it and even turn it into a faithful friend that does not betray you.

Once these abilities are possessed, the final step is represented by the desire to experience this stressful situation, the pleasure of feeling tense but convinced that there will be a solution no matter what problem arises. The pleasure of living this stress, that is the state of mind to dive into, feeling comfortable in uncomfortable situations, desiring to face the opponent and challenge them to the end.

So, let’s immerse ourselves in stress and experience it fully with joy!

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Need balance between grit and thought

Published on February 3, 2024 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments

When a realistically achievable outcome is at hand, that’s when the tension before a competition skyrockets. It may seem absurd, but usually, the higher the likelihood of delivering an excellent performance, the greater the stress and uncertainties that arise in the pre-game mind.

Over the years, I have learned that putting oneself in the optimal psychophysical condition is easier said than done.

Regardless of the sport, the athlete’s effort is directed towards balancing their determination or grit with the need to have those (simple) thoughts that allow them to stay focused on the task.

One can overdo determination, risking impulsive actions, or become too reflective, expressing doubts about the choices to be made. In both cases, the probability of making mistakes increases, deviating from the balance between grit and thought.

The purpose of mental training should be to teach awareness of the importance of this balance and enable the learning of the necessary ways to respond to the prevalence of one aspect over the other.

There are many psychological techniques to learn how to stay in one’s optimal mental condition, which can be acquired through constant training. In any case, this journey begins with the athlete’s awareness of the need to maintain this kind of balance during the competition.

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