Tag Archive for 'Corpo'

Are you fighting with your body

Wanting to change in order to feel more beautiful and more attractive is a legitimate need of every individual. In everyday life, putting on makeup or shaving are activities carried out by hundreds of millions of people who testify to the desire to take care of themselves. Not doing so would, on the contrary, lead to an unpleasant perception of oneself. Therefore, the search for beauty consists in taking actions to like oneself more, avoiding or at least significantly reducing conflicts with one’s body. What is the limit beyond which the attention to one’s own person becomes excessive if not even pathological? Here is a short list of what not to do:

  1. Do not eat because you want to look like a model
  2. Do not take medications or carry out treatments of any kind to reduce weight outside of medical supervision
  3. Do not abuse drugs or doping substances to improve your physical performance
  4. Do not rely on charlatans, individuals without an appropriate qualification to perform the activity in which they claim to be experts
  5. Do not trust the opinions of those who say they have obtained exceptional results, always verify this information with competent people
  6. Do not kill yourself with physical training just to “make a physical beach”. You can get very hurt and injured.
  7. Dislike yourself because you have a physique that is not perfect and not be aware of your qualities.
  8. Do not go from one diet to another, from one instructor to another, from one doctor to another, or from one idea to another just because you are not happy with the results you have achieved
  9. Don’t do what your best friend/friend did is not necessarily going to work for you or match your needs.
  10. In summary, do not decide with the head of others, listen to them and then reflect, talk to experienced professionals, reflect again and only at the end of this path decide and if you are not convinced: wait, taking more time before deciding.

Personal trainer’s skills

The personal trainer is now a professional figure well established in the world of fitness and promotion of active living. It is a different role from the coach and requires the development of specific skills that can be summarized as follows.

Social and Communication – You’ll be dealing with a wide variety of people. Purpose: to get the most out of each individual. Use your social skills. Cheerful and extrovert, so customers warm up quickly. Simple and precise, to persuade to follow session

Empathy - Each client comes from different backgrounds, faces challenges and lives different limits, physical and mental, to become physically fit. Connect personally with these challenges by listening to them and understanding their feelings. Watch the life through their eyes, understand their goals. Show genuine interest in them

Motivation and leadership - One of the main tasks is to provide reasons for motivation. You must be able to teach to be motivated. Important is the ability to motivate yourself every day and push you beyond your limits.

Planning & Organization - Work with many different customers. You need organization and planning to draw up unique plans, maintain awareness of the goals achieved and proceed.

Professionalism - Competence in proposing a training program. Professionalism is evident in dress and language. Friendly and sincere in the relationships with customers, be fit in order to demonstrate that you practice what you preach with great benefit on your body and mind

10 healthy rules to feel ourselves mentally and physically fit

In our society, very often feeling fit is experienced as a duty, because  our friends, the doctor or our partner ask us to be fit and we feel pushed to “do something” to not listen more those questions about why we do not want to do anything. Other times, however, it is the case of those who already practice in the gym to develop a mentality centered on the idea, that to feel good, we must do more and more and the results will be achieved only with pain and tiring sessions in which we challenge ourselves to reach the limit.

Neither of these two approaches to physical activity is of great help in promoting the pleasure of carrying out an activity without any other purpose than the desire to be physically and mentally fit and being at ease producing positive effects on one’s well-being, which are momentary but also lasting over time if carried out continuously. To motivate us to undertake and maintain this type of path it is important to know what we tell ourselves. Here are 10 rules, which represent 10 ways of doing that if acquired could support the choice and maintenance of a physically active lifestyle .

  1. Enjoy the work to be fit
  2. Build a peaceful mind
  3. Breath to feel your body
  4. Visualize your wellness
  5. Listen the heart calm and when working full of energy
  6. Image what you do before to do it
  7. Be your breathing
  8. Feel the body flexibility
  9. Be linked to the good mood
  10. Be grateful to yourself for what you do

Stay young. What a stupid idea

Today staying young seems to be the desire of many people. Again, as happens in sports, the use of drugs seems to be the most effective way to satisfy this desire. How much it’s absolutely necessary to maintain a flexible mind, open to innovation and change-oriented is too little stressed.

The body must be solicited effectively but the same goes for the mind. Otherwise dominate only the appearance, “have the Mr. Universe body”, but the mind will be totally abandoned. We know that we have to be physically active, but do we also know that we have to be mentally active?

We need to develop a social culture integrating these aspects, which are absolutely the same thing in the biological reality of each individual. There is no body and mind, there is the individual composed of different systems interacting continuously to facilitate adaptation and change.

The mental warm-up

Many athletes have no idea about the mental warm-up and think that it’s enough to heat only the body to be ready for training and the competitions. The mental warm-up guide the mind towards the main activities that the athlete will perform during the training session. It’s useful to activate the relationship between body, mind (cognitive and emotional processes) and motivation. When the athletes activate only the body, the risk is that they do not feel motivated to perform that workout or to begin without having reached the level of concentration needed to work effectively. It also allows to train the sense of responsibility of the athletes to get in each training session in the best physical and mental condition and it’s a way to prove to yourself that you want to be totally involved in what you will do in that day. A question that it should be asked is: ” How do I know that I am ready? And if not,  what I have to do to immediately change this attitude that prevents me”.

Kendo mental coaching for athletes

Eastern martial arts are a great teaching how to join in every movement mind and body. This concept in Kendo is expressed in a concept called with the word Shikai that highlights four mental obstacles that must be avoided. The first is the surprise – if I am surprised by my opponent means that I’m not ready to respond -. A second obstacle is the doubt – when I’m worried on what to do at a given moment, the action slows down or does not show enough conviction -. The third obstacle is the fear – the enemy becomes a giant and I feel not confident and overwhelmed by his strength -. The fourth is the confusion – I’m not focused on the here and now  but I’m distracted by my thoughts or what’s going on, I lose the fluidity of my movements - .

These mental states hold back the fighting or the performance and they are won through a psychological condition called Heigoshin , which means being present to ourselves as usual , keeping the mind quiet . This type of training is well detectable in scenes from the movie The Last Samurai .

What we learn from Schumacher

We who believe in the infallibility of the body and in the mind strength, we are crushed by the accident of Schumacher and his condition to be struggling to stay alive. This is not the first time that our belief is put to the test. It ‘s already happened hundreds of times in the past but every time we convince ourselves that will not be repeated again and instead  regularly there is a new victim. There is nothing so dangerous as to grow their own invincibility, because it will always be that day when you exceed the line that separates the acceptable from the unacceptable risk and then it’s over. At some point we need to explore other areas, other than those of the physical risk, otherwise it is only a matter of time. You must exit the field in which the physical risk is the main engine of our lives and choose another area of ​​risk, perhaps more mental but certainly not least exciting if you accept this logic. You must know that sooner or later the body will ask for the bill and unfortunately it can be very salty as the story of Schumacher teaches us .

Marion Bartoli leaves the court

A few weeks after the historic triumph at Wimbledon, Marion Bartoli retires from tennis. The 28-year old French player has announced through her tears, admitting she cannot longer bear the pain caused by her injuries. “My body is starting to fall apart, I managed to hold them together going through the pain during Wimbledon,” said Bartoli after the match lost against the Romanian Halep. “Everyone will remember my title at Wimbledon. None this last game, “continued the French – clarifying how it was “a difficult decision to make. I had the opportunity to turn my biggest dream into reality. And I really pushed myself beyond the extreme limits to make it happen. Now, however – she added – I cannot continue to do it. “

It’s possible to perform well and make trivial mistakes

A reader wrote  asking for a comment:

“on a tennis player Francesca Schiavone as she has a lot of potential and recently in many games when then she earns points she starts to make some rookie mistakes like double errors and direct mistakes. How is this possible?”

I do not follow the matches of Francesca Schiavone and then I have no idea of how many are in percentage terms this kind of errors and how they affect the result,  it’s any way possible to talk about these types of errors.

Physical problems – the courts requires optimal physical condition otherwise it’s difficult to maintain the quality of the game. It’s possible to play well some games and then make mistakes even trivial because the body “takes a break” to recovery.

Concentration problems – The concentration is another aspect whose presence must be constant during each game and it’s influenced by the physical shape. It’s also influenced by the thoughts and moods that the athlete develops after an error and therefore it interferes with the ability to refocus on the next game.

Toughness problems – A long sports career also wears the toughness. It is not easy to maintain an high desire to succeed.

Take care of your body

Yesterday I published an article talking about the relevance of the movement for an healthy life. Today I report a sentence to push each of us to have a true  physically active life.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”

Jim Rohn (Americal speaker and Author)