Tag Archive for 'prestazioni'

When to start the mental coaching?

To develop and maintain during the season a good set of mental skills, the athletes must train them as they do for the physical skills.  The mental skills training must be integrated into the daily sessions. Mental and physical skills have to proceed in parallel every day. The best moment to start this practice is off-season or early pre-season. For instance, to start the attentional training it’s easy at the beginning when the athletes are more calm and less tired and practice is not yet  very difficult as compared to the following training periods. The worst moments to start is when the athletes have shown problems during their performances and the coaches thinks that they are mind difficulties. At those moment they ask for an intervent of the sport psychologist. Usually this happens because the coaches believe that they have done all that they can do but the athletes look de-motivated, or anxious or distracted and they do not know any other options to training them.   It’s a crisis intervention that the sport psychologis can manage but the coaches and the athletes need to understand that the mental training must be integrated inside their sessions and not only used as a solution for the bad moments.

There is a relation between excellence and talent?

We often talk of talent as something strongly linked to excellence in performance. Often talk about talent is used as a criterion to eliminate some athletes, because according to someone they do not possess it or it’s used to nitpick forgetting the global relevance of the athlete. At this regard, the thought of a champion like Michael Phelps can serve to reflect on how much the athlete’s mental attitude is the main aspect to coach him/her to provide excellent performances.

“People say I have a great talent, but in my opinion excellence has nothing to do with talent. It is about what you choose to  believe and how determined you are to get there. The mind is more powerful than anything else.” (Michael Phelps)

Are you able to put in a corner the worst performances?

I’m here in Malta to follow the competition of a friend of shooting. Today he did 23 out of 25 the first round and then made 19 and 23. Tomorrow he still has two trounds to show that the 19 was just an accident. Another story, today Juventus is playing with Pescara, easy game on paper but it is essential to win to keep high the team’s mood and confidence and to show themselves that the defeat against Bayern was an accident the psychological impact of which can be recovered with a good performance.

What do these have in common?! They are so far from each other by level and interests involved: that in any case when competing no matter what you did before, it counts only the skills to provide the best performance of which one is capable at the next. What was it is just a story that must be able to set aside.