The Importance of Games

Summary

• Games are very important to an athlete. Kids spend a lot of time and energy in improving their skills and ability to play a sport or many sports. Therefore we need to remember that they have invested a lot into preparing for games.
• Games are the best way to see how well they have improved and what they need to improve on. It’s a test that can show their strengths and weaknesses.
• As parents, we can help prepare an athlete by making improvements in the 4 elements of being an athlete.
• Physical: Coaches will be working on the strength and conditioning of your athlete. Parents should be focus on fueling them. Keeping it simple with REAL food. Real food will fuel performance and help with recovery after games.
• Mental: Encourage healthy self-talk by showing them. Watch your own self-talk when around your athlete. Keep it positive. It will help when your kid is in a tough game.
• Emotional: It’s all about controlling emotions. Emotion is a form of energy that can be used for sports. An athlete that can use emotions to their advantage may have more energy in the 4^th quarter.
• Social: Games are social events. Coaches, teammates, and parents have to lift each other up. It helps in games, practice, and life.
• Remember games are important because your athlete has invested a lot of time and energy. Plus it tests the physical, mental, emotional, and social elements.

Full Transcript

Games. I always think of gladiators when I think of games, but hopefully you didn't sign your kid up to be a gladiator, because running around with sharp objects, fighting other people near lions, and wearing a tin can as if that's going to help, is probably not the best choice. But I want to talk about games, and how important games are to your athlete, because games are very important.

My name's David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete to help parents raise happy, healthy, high performing athletes. Games are very important, and for really one reason, the investment your kid has made into preparing for those games. It's the investment, the time and energy they put into it to be a better player or better athlete, so that they can prepare for the game, which is why the game is so important. It's that preparation or that process that they're going through to get to that game, and as parents, guess what? We can help. We can help them prepare better for the game.

Remember my definition of athlete. An athlete is a person with physical, mental, emotional, and social strength and control. Let's go through that as our baseline to figuring out how we can better prepare our athlete for the games.

First of all, we're looking at physical, the physical element, obviously we think of the coaches pushing them, running them, doing weight training, whatever, the strength and conditioning stuff, but as a parent we have a lot of control on recovery, and the easiest way to help your athlete recover is feeding them real food. The food that they get in will help replenish those muscle fibers that have been torn, and replenish the glycogen storage and all that stuff. Real food is going to help them recover. Focus on that, again, you can focus on the right percentage of proteins, fats, and carbs, but if you just focus on real food, you're going to be okay.

Second one is mental. The mental game, we know during the game you got to be there mentally. You got to prep the same way, you practice what you're going to be doing in the game. One of the best things that we can do is watch our athlete, watch their self-talk and that will help them mentally, because what they will do is they'll talk themselves into being whatever they say, self-talk we want it to be positive, none of this, I can't, I'm incapable, I'm not worthy or whatever. We want to keep it positive. That also includes you as well, because your kid is watching you, and so you want to be able to be the best example because they're going to watch you probably more than they'll listen to you, and so if you are giving yourself these negative self talk statements, like I'm not good enough or whatnot, they're going to watch and it's going to encourage them to do the same. Watch your self-talk, watch their self-talk. Remember, encourage them to do positive self-talk, encourage them to understand that that is powerful. That's going to be for the mental side.

Now the emotional side, again, we're not looking at eliminating any emotions, it's more about control. It's okay to feel, and that's what you want to allow your kids to do, is just feel, it's all right, it's okay if you feel a certain way. Without emotions you wouldn't really have any passion for whatever sport you're playing for. Emotions I think are huge, emotions to me is really about energy, and what we're looking at doing is we're trying to harness that energy, we're trying to control it.

Lastly is social. With the social aspect, we're looking at just being encouraging, as an encouraging teammate or player. When you're encouraging your athlete, encourage them to encourage others, because believe it or not, when you start encouraging others they're more likely to encourage you and vice versa. Next thing you know the team is being lifted up and it could be because of you or your kid.

Remember the definition of athlete. Those are the best ways I think that you can help your athlete prepare for these important games, because the games are important, but it's all because of the investment your kid has made, and if we can help them be better prepared, then that investment wouldn't be wasted, because it's no fun putting in a lot of time, energy, the whole blood, sweat and tears into practice, and wasting it because, well we didn't recover well, because we were giving ourselves negative self-talk, because we were trying to hide our emotions, and because we weren't willing to bring our teammates up. Make sure that you as a parent can help prepare your athletes by doing those little things, and those little things then will become habit to them and then we can be prepared. When you're prepared, you're more likely to win.

That's pretty much all I got for you for this video. I hope you practice that. If you liked this video give it a thumbs up, hit that subscribe button, and please leave a comment below, let me know what you think of this video, let me know what you want to see in the future and maybe you'll see a video on that. Until next time, take care.