We already know that playing sports helps us to maintain our physical health. But have you ever wondered how sports activities help children and young athletes to shape their psychological health. Yes! Sports is more than just becoming champions. It build & shape their psychological skills. Some of them are leadership, self-esteem, stress management. These are the skills that will help them to win the victories of everyday life.

In this article, I’m going to share the top 10 benefits of sports in personal development and how these points will help young athletes to develop positive attitude.

1. Develop Communication Skills

Communication is the key to success in any field. If a person is unable to communicate with others, they will be unable to reach their goals. In sports, kids have to interact with their teammates, coaches, and opposing teams. This experience will remove the fear of interaction with others and help them to develop strong communication skills. This trait will benefits them later in achieving their goals.

2. Improve Focus

Whatever the task you are performing, the ability to focus is essential to achieve success. When athletes are playing a certain game, they make on the spot strategies and try to focus on winning the game. This concentration strengthen their brain functioning through increased flow of blood and oxygen and improve their mental health.

3. Build Self Confidence

Children and young athletes can build self-confidence through sports. The action of shaking hands and receiving praise from the crowd helps them to realize their importance and feel happier about themselves. It also encourages kids to socialize with other players, which is great if they are looking for friends. This is important because confidence is a key factor in becoming successful in any field, including sports!

4. Leadership Skills

Sports help children to learn the art of leadership. Being a leader of the team, they experience different things like giving instructions to team members, motivate them to play well, and also learn to handle a defeat.- something that will always be important in life! This skill will lately help them to achieve success by leading any company or organization.

5. Sense of Not Giving Up

Kids in sports learn how to take failures as a learning experience. If they lose a game, they will try to identify what went wrong and how to improve that mistake. This will create a sense of not giving up in their mind that will be beneficial for achieving their goals with consistency.

6. Improves Interpersonal Skills

In sports, you are bound to meet people. When children and young athletes meet people from different areas they communicate and share creative ideas. This social interaction helps them to make more friends and improves their interpersonal skills.

7. Stress Management

Sports are a great way to relive stress and depression. Playing different games every day, stimulates the production of endorphins which is a natural mood lifter. So, these sport activities control young athletes stress levels and burn negative thoughts.

8. Build Organizational Skill

You may have heard this before: sports and studies don’t mix. But that’s a misconception! When children are in sports, they learn to organize their sport activities and assignments. They make schedules for both things and work accordingly. In this way, they can perform well in both studies and sports.

9. Sense of Problem Solving

While playing different games, like badminton, table tennis, cricket, swimming, a sportsmen play with full passion in order to win. But let’s say, if an athlete gets injured during the game, all the players will solve the problem on the spot by giving him first aid. This will create a sense of problem solving in their lives and they will always try to solve the real life problems.

10. Planning

Planning before executing is the best way to perform anything. Sports teaches athletes to make different strategies and plan every step of game before playing. This pre-planning will help them to perform every step accordingly in order to win the game. Planning is skill of practical life that needs to be learned by every individual, and sports is the best way to do it!

CONCLUSION

From children to adults, every individual should engage themselves in sport activities. We go gym for physical and mental fitness, but why not take the same approach to something else like sports. We want to help you achieve your full potential as an athlete. So let our sport journal and mobile app help you to enhance your athletic capabilities creatively!

Effect of sport journal on student athlete cognitive function and perceive physical literacy !

During the upcoming 2021 Virtual Sport for Life Canadian Summit, Dr. Raymond Sum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong will be sharing the research he’s been doing involving these journals, and detailing his plans to use them as part of a larger project. Created by Sportéco, the journals are currently being published into multiple languages.

Read the full article on the official website of Sport For Life by clicking here.

Sport for Life and Long-Term Athlete Development is providing age-appropriate skills development, training and competition so that we can keep kids in sport for longer and encourage them to be active for life.

Through years and years the Sport for Life summit brings together leaders who work to enhance the quality of sport and physical activity in Canada. Sport for life recognizes that quality sport and physical literacy offer rich benefits to Canadian Society through improved health, stronger communities, higher sporting achievement, and stronger national identity.

Sporteco presenting at Sport for Life Summit 2020

On the 30th of January 2020, we had the great opportunity to present on stage our Interactive Training journals and the methodology behind it. This year’s theme was Celebrating Success, it had per objective to share the achieved successes and to understand how these successes came to be and what we can do to ensure continued success.

We shared why the mental engagement through interactive training journals is triggered by the method of goal setting and self reflection through handwriting is a successful practice. And how it helps athletes no matter in which sport or level they are to succeed in their sport as their life.

In fact nowadays in our digital era, it is very important to remind the importance of goal setting and self reflection and the impact it has on a person’s development, especially from the youngest age.

Unlike using the keyboard to type, the method of handwriting combined with self reflection approach directly triggers the mental resources to function better. It is one of the most important parts of personal growth and development.

Especially for an athlete by using a pen and paper to write down his goals and objectives, he takes the time while writing to visualize what he wants to accomplish. It is like a soft discipline as he is taking an engagement to himself in order to achieve a specific goal.

By writing small goals and objectives, it is an established step by step pathway for the athlete to reach his ultimate goal, which is becoming a better version of himself.

Grabbing a pen and paper it is not meant only for athletes but also it is an incredible method that will help anyone in their personal life. When you take a pen and paper, you are totally free to write, draw and let your imagination do the rest for you. It is a great technique to improve your creative thinking.

This is the place where you can be yourself, where nobody will judge you, by writing down your thoughts and your feelings, you free yourself from unexpressed feelings.

It is a great tool to learn about yourself and to deepen the understanding of who you are.

Canada Basketball beginning in 2020 will be equipped with the new Interactive Training Journals that combine Basketball and life skills.

After several months of hard and dedicated work, we are very happy to announce the most recent release of our project created in collaboration with Canada Basketball. For 2020, 15 000 lucky athletes will have the opportunity to deepen their mental engagement through goal setting and self-reflection by using our New Interactive Training Journals adapted especially for their program.

During the training program the focus is, on fun, developing the confidence and competence in enjoying physical activities. Where during the activities the athlete will work on fundamental movement skills of running, jumping, throwing, catching, balance, agility, and co-ordination. The program will also work to begin and progress on the development of some of the fundamental basketball and life skills.

Basketball & Life skills

For 13 weeks, participants of the program will be working on essential basketball skills such as dribbling, passing, shooting, rebound and playing defense. Additionally, to these skills, the approach with life skills makes the Canada Basketball Program unique. Athletes progressing through the program will learn every week about fundamental life skills that will help them during their whole life. It is a great tool to track not only the player’s development but also his emotional situation.

© 2020 Canada Basketball. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this image content will result in immediate legal action.

The journal was developed for the whole program duration, week by week program. The athletes before the practice will set up goals for every week and after every single practice will self reflect on learned basketball and life skills. Those journals have per objective to build the habit of goal setting and self reflection through handwriting.

In fact, consistency in the usage of this method will result in multiple benefits that athletes with acquire. You can learn more about it on my sport journal.

We truly believe that every single child has the capacity to reach his full potential!