Tag Archive for 'Libri'

How many Italians are reading and who are they?

Published on May 27, 2022 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: donne, giovani, Istat, Libri, uomini.

ISTAT data from 2020 help build a picture of the situation.

Readership has been declining since 2010; in 2020 only 41.4% of the population has read at least one book in the past year.
The female population shows a greater propensity to read as early as age 6: overall 47.1% of women, compared to 33.5% of men, have read at least one book during the year.
More young people between the ages of 11 and 14 (58.6%) read more than all other age groups.
More women (46.4%) read than men (36.1%).
The audience most fond of reading is girls aged 11 to 24 (more than 60% have read at least one book in the year). The share of female readers falls below the national average after age 60, while for males it is always less than 50 percent except for boys aged 11 to 14 years slightly higher.
Reading is linked to educational level: 72.8% of college graduates read, 49.1% of high school graduates read, and only 26.8% among those with an elementary school diploma.
Territorial gaps persist: fewer than one in three people read in the southern regions (29.2%), while those in the northeast reach the highest percentage (44.3%) and 48.5 in the northwest and 44.3% in the center.
Less than half of the readers (44.6%) say they have read at most three books in the 12 months prior to the interview; these are the so-called “weak readers” among whom are just under half of male readers (48.5%) and people between the ages of 11 and 14 (47.2%). 15.2% count themselves among “strong readers” (with at least 12 books read in the past year). Women’s greater propensity to read is also found in the intensity of reading: 16.7% say they read an average of one book per month compared to 13.3% of men.
In 2016, about one in ten households had no books at all in the home, a figure that has now been constant for almost two decades.
Among those with both parents who are readers, 78.1% of 6-18 year olds read; it stands at 64.5% if it is only the mother who has the reading habit and 63.8% if it is only the father. In contrast, the share of 6-18 year olds reading drops to 36.3% if both parents are not book readers.

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Remember the reasons to read

Published on May 27, 2022 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: leggere, lettura, Libri.

“If you want your children to be smart, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be smarter, read them more fairy tales” (Albert Einstein).

Reading helps the brain retain information and also trains cognitive skills: it improves attentional skills and concentration. Nowadays, the speed with which technology-related stimuli reach our brains, the numerous inputs even in parallel, the absence of the concept and the ability to wait at the expense of immediacy, are going to erode our attentional skills, which are drastically reducing and adapting to the increasingly smart environment we live in. Reading can be an activity that helps to counteract or contain this process. In an age when we are increasingly “forgetful” as we delegate all our memories and everything we should not forget to our cell phones, reading helps to foster memory-related processes, to remember and recall content we have acquired through reading and to learn new vocabulary.

Reading also improves our emotional intelligence: it helps to understand that there is another who is different from us and develops or increases the ability to empathize with the other and to understand that there is more than just one’s own point of view. The reader then activates a mentalization process that leads him or her to understand the intentions, goals, emotions, and other mental states of the characters being narrated in the story. In effect, a narrated story is a set of representations of events and characters. Reading is also an activity that also enriches language property and narrative construction.

So many authors agree that reading for and with children is a fundamental practice not only for development but also for sharing emotions with parents, opinions, mutual interchange and teaching: it fosters the creation of an affective bond or its reinforcement. It does not mean that digital should be eliminated from the lives of children and adolescents, it means that inputs from technology activate different neural networks and therefore, in a world where technological development can no longer be ignored, we need to create a balance between the two. We should not forget that reading also trains brain functions that stimulate critical and reflective thinking and thus fosters autonomy from a psychological point of view.

One must also educate about reading

For these reasons, it is essential to educate about reading by getting children to experience the magic hidden in reading a book. One must read in the classroom, gradually bringing them to do so not out of school obligation but out of pleasure also of sharing with adults and peers. To stimulate adolescents, on the other hand, it is important to intrigue them, they love to read and this is demonstrated for example by the virality that books-and often the respective streaming series-acquire in which they see themselves and recognize themselves.

The problem is that today even many adults no longer set a good example because they relegate reading to a more marginal or secondary activity compared to all their other commitments: there is too much of a hurry and too little time to devote to a book, forgetting that for children the example of words is more important.

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Why we need to read the book

Published on May 26, 2022 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: lettura, Libri.

April 23 is the date chosen by UNESCO to celebrate the book, in fact it coincides with the day of death in 1616 of three writers who are pillars of universal culture: Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare and the Spanish poet Garciloso de la Vega.

“He who reads will have lived 5,000 years: he was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired the infinite … because reading is a backward immortality.”

So wrote Umberto Eco, and it is a sentence that encapsulates the meaning of reading. Because reading means entering into the lives of others, empathizing, discovering and knowing. To laugh and cry through the eyes of those characters who lived in another era, in another world. But it also means finding oneself and recognizing oneself in stories and tales. Above all, it means knowing and learning.

Susanna Tamaro wrote.

“Reading, after all, means nothing more than creating a small garden within our memory. Each book brings a few elements, a flowerbed, an avenue, a bench on which to rest when we are tired. Year after year, reading after reading, the garden turns into a park, and in this park, someone else may happen to be there.”

Each year a world capital is designated to this day. This year the choice fell on a Malaysian city, Kuala Lampur, which has made a strong commitment to making culture a commodity for all citizens, as accessible as clean water.

The health emergency, restrictions and lockdown encouraged even more reading. So many books were taken from the shelves and re-read on those days when everyone was forced to stay home. So many paper books and so many digital ones. According to the data, paper books still remain, however, the ones preferred by Italians, who for 89.83 percent prefer them to ebooks.

Being able to flip through the pages of a text, underline or simply smell the paper for many, gives more incentive to read. The indispensable scent of paper and the pleasure in physically flipping through pages are themselves integral parts of the act of reading.

“Reading a lot is one of the paths that lead to originality; one is the more original and peculiar the more he knows what others have said.” (Miguel de Unamuno)

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In the digital age we lose the depth of our thoughts

Published on October 25, 2021 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: Libri, social, studiare.

I suggest reading this thought by Italo Calvino expressed in his Lezioni americane more than thirty years ago.

“Sometimes it seems to me that a pestilential epidemic has struck humanity in the faculty that most characterizes it, that is, the use of language that manifests itself as a loss of cognitive force … that tends to level the expression on the most generic formulas, anonymous … to extinguish every spark that sprouts from the clash of words with new circumstances”.

How does the cognitive force of thought manifest itself in our daily lives?

Through words that allow to express our ideas and emotional states. If the words are well organized in a specific language we can be understood by other people. Social networks and the increasing amount of time we dedicate to them, precisely because of the simplicity they require, decrease the expressive capacity of our thoughts, as they are forced to become simplified and superficial in order to be shared and increase our followers. The repetitiveness in time of this way of communicating will determine the reduction of the depth of our thoughts.

Salvation to this mental downsizing of human beings can only be given by studying and reading novels.

Let us reflect.

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A winning combination: sports and reading

Published on September 23, 2021 in Allenatori, Calcio, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching, Olimpiadi, Stress, Tennis and Tiro a volo. 0 Comments Tags: leggere, lettura, Libri.

The Nobel Prize for Economics James Heckman has shown that children of unemployed in kindergarten possessed a vocabulary of 500 words, those of parents of low-skilled 700 words, while the sons of the graduates came to 1100 words. Unfortunately these differences persist even in later allowing to predict well in advance the career, income, family stability and health condition. Therefore it need educational investments such as to develop the cognitive and social skills in children from 0 to 5 years, and also in later life.
Novak Diokovic wrote in his book: “Jelena made me listen to classical music and read poetry to calm down and learn to concentrate (Pushkin was his favorite poet). My parents, however, spurred me to learn languages, so I learned the ‘English, German and Italian. the tennis lessons and life lessons were one, and every day I could not wait to take the field with Jelena and learn more and more on sports, on myself and on world. “(p.5)

It is not hard to understand from these data and evidences what it should be done to educate young people and that sport would benefit from an education centered on the development of reading. I am convinced that the absence of sport culture found in many countries derives precisely from this kind of ignorance and of which many young people are paying for, ruining their lives well before adulthood. In Italy:

Women read more than men: in the year one book has been read by 51.9% of the female population compared to 39.7% of men. The difference in behavior between the sexes begins to manifest itself as early as the 11 years and tends to decrease after 75.
Having parents who read encourage to read: 77.4% of boys aged 6 to 14 years with both parents readers, compared with 39.7% of those whose parents do not read.
In Italy, even those who read, read little: 46% of readers read more than three books in 12 months, while the “strong readers”, with 12 or more books read at the same time, are only 14, 5% of the total.
One family of ten (10.2%) do not have any books at home, 63.6% have a maximum of 100.

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Eliud Kipchoge challenge the human limits

Published on October 4, 2019 in Allenatori, Corsa, Generale, Giovani, Mental coaching and Stress. 0 Comments Tags: 1h59, disciplina, Eliud Kipchoge, Libri, maratona, mente, record, Vienna.

Eliud KipchogeKenyan

35 years, 1m67, 52 Kg
Marathon runner, 230km week
Married, 3 children
Olympic gold and world recordman on the marathon in 2h1m39s

Goal: Run the marathon in 1h59m in Vienna in the next few days

Mental Attitude (mindset)

Training, passion and self-discipline
He writes down everything he does in notebooks.
He writes down his feelings to remember them
Read Aristotle, Confucius and Paul Coelho
He runs with his mind relaxed
“Respect a law, that of never telling you lies”
“Only the disciplined are free, the others are slaves to moods and passions.”
“When I train, I try to feel my body and give more and more. I don’t believe in limits.
“You have to have a great conviction and a team that believes in you and supports you. Shoes are also important. And then you have to be stronger than any other runner in the past. Everything is possible”.
“Marathon is life. If you want to be happy you have to enjoy life and I enjoy running the marathon. That’s why I smile.

He leads a spartan life:

Always gets up at 5 a.m. in Kaptagat (Kenya)
The weekend returns to the family
He cleans his room and bathroom
He washes his knits and socks in a bowl that he then spreads like the others
In the afternoon, he drinks a cup of tea and eats a slice of bread.

(Source: Emanuela Audisio, Repubblica e correre.it)

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Review: #100volteCONI

Published on September 4, 2014 in Generale and Libri. 0 Comments Tags: 100, absolutely free editore, Coni, gianni bondini, giulio onesti, Libri.

#100volteCONI

Mille cinguettii per 100 anni di CONI

Gianni Bondini

Absolutely Free Editore, 2014, 175p.

http://www.absolutelyfree.it/

The Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) celebrated this year 100 years and Gianni Bondini wanted to retrace this period with a current style. “To flash” writes himself like Twitter but without respecting the rule of 140 characters, too few to make himself understood. But the purpose was this: to attract young people, the people of social networks to our sport history. The first two chapters cover the 400 years prior to the CONI foundation and we discover, for example, that football in 1400 was a combat sport with two teams of 27 players and 6 referees for a game that could have a duration of a day. That the challenge of Barletta in 1503 can be considered as a team competition. Or that in 1423, Vittorino da Feltre organized a university campus where the rich young men studied and practiced sport, because “the mind develops in harmony with the body.” While in 1519, is published in Venice the “Encyclopedia of exercise” and the United States to cancel the traditional British rugby turns it in American football and cricket in baseball. But these are just some of the valuable information that we find in the 11 chapters, presented more in a few lines, never more than 10/12. Bondini produces a repetition knowledge probably known only by sports historians and ignored by the multitude of coaches and managers. Who knows for example that the newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport was published initially on Mondays and Fridays on green paper and yellow to stand out, while from January 2, 1899 comes in pink. Anyone complains today that athletes are often left alone, he’s right if you think with the mind of today, but we may find out that it was much worse before. At first Olympic Games in Athens , officially did not attend any Italian. It is not true. Carlo Airoldi came on foot from Milan, 1338 km, but he did not compete in the marathon because in a race won 2 Italian Lire and for this reason he could not be called as amateur. Of doping it was spoken in 1904 for the Games in Saint Louis, derived from the English word “dope,” which describes a stimulating drink for the horses. I could go on with many other news, the book is full of them, that we can read with great pleasure, because tweets are written with a great sense of humor. I want to conclude by saying that it’s a book of culture, it tells what was and what is now the sport organized by CONI. It ‘s a book stimulating curiosity and more knowledge as tweets do not allow in-depth and not surprisingly, the first Twitter of the book is entitled: #Buy sports books. These are the words that Giulio Onesti said the March 8, 1948 offering of his own pocket 80,000 Lire to the National Sporting Library.

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Book review: 7 Things We Don’t Know!

Published on June 19, 2014 in Libri. 0 Comments Tags: coaching, Damian Farrow, Jean Fournier, Libri, Mindeval, skill.

7 Things We Don’t Know!

Coaching Challenges in Sport Psychology and Skill Acquisistion

Jean Fournier and Damian Farrow

Mindeval Canada Inc, 2013

www.mindeval.com

The link to read the first chapter is here: www.mindeval.com/en/

7 Things We Don’t Know! is a book designed for progressive coaches who are motivated to consider and potentially adjust their current coaching or training programs so that they are getting the most out of contemporary Sport Psychology and Skill Acquisition research. I believe it will also relevant for the sport psychologists because the authors talk about coaching problem, imagery, cognitive processes like anticipation and attention from a perspective different from usual. In this way, many practitioners could start to think in a different way your daily job with athletes and coaches.

Second, what makes this book different from many other texts on Sport Psychology and Skill Acquisition is that the content is presented in the most applicable manner to coaches and athletes. It is written with a short and concise style, and numerous practical examples are provided to illustrate how the theories could be applied to practice.

The imagery is discussed in light of its practical application, it’s well explained the use of this skill must match well with the athletes’ needs, integrating this mental activity in the coaching sessions. The second chapter is devoted to the use of mindfulness in mental coaching. Jean Fournier propose a mindfulness program based on his experiences in different sports and the pages on this topic illustrate his approach based on four steps: presentation of the method and assessment, mindfulness training, acceptance training and attention training. The third regards the thinking. He try to clarify: what does focus mean? The readers will find suggestions to find the relevant focus point in different sports and different situations, to improve the focus in training and to apply all these things during the competitions. The following chapter is about the use of the routines, it’s explained why they are useful in sports but there is a new aspect introduced in this presentation, regarding the use of mindfulness in the routine planned by the athletes. The next four chapters are written by the other author, Damian Farrow. His first chapter talks about the relevance of variability during training and the need to organize the drills in a way very near to the competition rules and development. It’s a chapter that I suppose very useful for the coaches, who must always to cope with the dilemma about necessity to integrate the repetitions and athletes’ motivation and about the relation between the standard repetitions and drills more similar to the game characteristics. In these pages Farrow provides information confirming the concept that the athletes learn to anticipate instead to be born with this gift and he talks about a number of training approaches to improve this skill. Goal of the following chapter is to encourage coaches to use implicit coaching style instead to use only an explicit style. Farrow remember that probably the best implicit information an athlete can receive is the Nike motto: “Just do it.” The last chapter regards another relevant question: have the athletes need of a coach feedback provided in a real time? Today coaches with the help of the new technologies have the opportunity to provide information in real time with great precision. The problem they have to cope with regards their competences to use the correct timing without the risk to overload the athletes’ mind. Farrow talks about the definition of the bandwidth of correctness for a movement. Established this range of correctness the coaches will know exactly when to provide a corrective feedback.

Final comment: read this book with the spirit to find some new ideas for our work and to change something in our approach with the athletes.

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Evoluzione psicologia dello sport

Published on July 14, 2011 in Generale. 0 Comments Tags: Libri, psicologia dello sport.

La notevole evoluzione che sta avendo la psicologia dello sport la si può notare anche dai titoli dei libri che vengono pubblicati in lingua inglese. Alcuni esempi: Essential readings in sport and exercise psychology, Social psychology in sport, Xritical essays in applied sport psychology psychology, Psychobiology of physical activity, Inside sport psychology, Motivating people to be physically active, Deviance and social control in sport, Sport psychology in practice, Founations of sport and exercise psychology, Self- efficacy in sport, Attention and motor skill learning, Adavnces in sport psychology, Doing sport psychology. Sono tutti pubblicati dallo stesso editore e non sono certamente tutti. Quanti ne avete letti…

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