Tag Archive for 'gara'

Having fun in competition is not a joke

Having fun is not a joke.
Often coaches say to athletes: “Go and have fun”. And they look at them with two eyes out of their sockets saying but “what are you saying, here I have to give my best I am not going to the pizzeria with friends”.

They are both right and wrong. How do you have fun when you are committed to giving your best? Then the athletes are right. Maybe there is a way to have fun in the most competitive moments? So the coaches are right.

The question is well expressed by Sun Yingsha: You must have the pleasure of facing difficult situations! In this way the fun is given by the pleasure of facing challenges with all the risks involved.

Our ultimate adversaries

Today Jack Nicklaus continues to be an exceptional source of inspiration for all the athletes independently of their sport. Here remember us that the two ultimate adversaries are the course, the environmental context of the competition, and ourselves.

How much time do you spend to coach the skill to manage and reduce their influence on the performance?

The athletes’ main psychological mistakes

The athletes’ main psychological mistakes:

  1. Think that feel healthy is enough to do the best.
  2. Visualize the race without providing for the possible difficulties that could be happened and not provide a way to solve them.
  3. Be too much/little activated, driven by the desire to win or the fear of not succeeding.
  4. Be so much worried about the race and not focused on the present but on what might happen of negative.
  5. Not thinking the difficulties during the race as a normal part of the performance but as personal incompetence.

To win you have to adapt to race situations

I would like to reflect about one idea:

with the aim that the athletes can deal the competitions with a winning attitude, they  must know how to adapt the technique and tactics to situations of competition they face. This work of adapting themselves to the race is a mental activity, through the use of their cognitive, motivational, emotional and interpersonal processes. The athletes must therefore have developed over the years of training the ability to assess, decide and act in the best way at any time of the competition.

Question:

what part of the training of your athletes is dedicated to develop this kind of competence?

The toughest international sled dog race

La Grande Odyssee

La Grande Odyssée Savoie Mont Blanc is, since the first edition in January 2005, the toughest international sled dog race in the world because of the topography of the mountain it covers. Each year the race brings together 20 of the best mushers in the world. Together with their Alaskan and Siberian Huskies, they stride 900km (about 560 miles) in Savoie and Haute Savoie and climb over 25 000 m.

Why in the winter no one is dressed in summer

In the winter, no one takes to the streets dressed in summer, because we know that in this way we get sick and then to prevent this eventuality, we dress to winter. Why so frequently, first do we make a mistake and then we try to correct ourselves, instead to work to prevent it? It’s said that to prevent is better than cure. In sports errors represent what it should be avoided, the disease from which we must free ourselves, and usually taught that the cure is to learn to react to them as quickly as possible. This teaching is well summarized in the phrase: “No matter how many times you fall but how quickly you get up again.” To achieve this goal, the athletes are trained to get back to being focused on performance immediately after they did ​​a mistake. But if it’s better to avoid getting sick, what is the way to prevent errors? This means being aware of which behaviors to avoid and what to put in place instead. Regarding to sport, it means being aware of what mistakes we can make in that workout or race and to know what it’s the way to avoid them. Consequently, the athletes should be aware of situations that must be met, think about the mistakes that they could commit and that they has committed in the past and focus only on the actions that must take to do well. In this way, they will learn not so much to eliminate the difficulties, which are always present in a race, but to deal with them in a winning way.

The main role played by the attitude (2)

Have the “right” attitude means being totally focused only on what should be done to provide the best performance of which we are able. Just before the start of the competition and during its course, the athlete should be focused on making at the best her work. The training and the past performances must should be taught to manage the distractions, in order to react to them almost unconsciously. In those moments every kind of thinking is immediately classified as useful or useless to do well. The first is maintained and allows to remain focused on performance, while the latter must be eliminated. In this way the athlete is in control of his performance, he lives only in the present and is able to respond quickly to what happens in the competition.

Unsatisfied of what?

In questo periodo dell’anno parlò con molti atleti che sono scontenti delle loro prestazioni, si sono allenati per tutto l’inverno e ora vorrebbero vincere sempre o comunque fare molto bene. Aspettative legittime ma irrealistiche, perché ci sono anche gli avversari ma soprattutto in quanto gareggiare non è solo una espressione del proprio valore tecnico ma è un’attività che deve essere guidata dalla mente. Diciamo pure che senza la mente, la tecnica è inutile; perché la gara è gestione efficace dello stress agonistico, che una volta domato consente alla tecnica dell’atleta di esprimersi al massimo livello. Chi non fosse in grado di svolgere questi compiti non potrà mai gareggiare con soddisfazione o in modo vincente.