Basic skills and sport

Sport does not only consist of physical activity to develop muscles and achieve better physical shape, through exercise it is also possible to strengthen the personal development and well-being, acquire personal skills or enhance existing ones both in sports, work or social contexts.

To develop a physical activity it is necessary to have a series of basic cognitive, attitudinal and emotional competencies. The WHO says that skills are "those skills necessary to have adequate and positive behavior, which allows us to effectively face the demands and challenges of daily life".

These general skills that we need are acquired through practice and can be extrapolated to many areas, thus improving the life of the person in general..
One of these skills that can be developed or improved through sport is social skill.

Social skills

- Empathy. Understand the other. A healthy rivalry encourages knowing and respecting the other.

- Assertive communication. To be able to express yourself clearly. In sport this is very important especially in conflict situations. Coaches often emphasize the need to speak, to communicate when we did not like something.

- Relationships. Interacting with people and maintaining friendships helps strengthen our self-concept. Through sport we can improve them especially with team sports.

Personal skills

• Self-knowledge. The demands of the sport force us to know ourselves better and to know where our limits are..

• Decision making. Evaluating the different possibilities and analyzing the consequences are two very common actions in sport, it also teaches us to be responsible for our decisions and assume the results..

• Problem resolution. It is closely linked to the above. By working with the team or with the coach, you learn to face conflict situations in a socially appropriate way..

• Creative thinking. This type of thinking makes the search for alternatives easier and helps to innovate.

• Managing emotions. Sport helps us to know how to identify how we feel and how we behave based on those feelings, it teaches us to know how to handle emotions such as aggressiveness.

• Stress management. Since doing sports activities often makes you be in moments of great stress, which you have to learn to drive in order to perform adequately.

Another set of skills that helps us develop the sport are the psychomotor skills like running, climbing, throwing / catching, balance etc. that require coordination between certain parts of our brain. Through sport we can train all this set of activities and improve them in such a way that, for example, a child with a psychomotor deficit can make it disappear over time or at least improve, thus helping him to lead a life as normalized as possible.

Therefore, sport not only has physical benefits but also helps to forge our personality and personal growth..

In addition, sport also has other benefits such as helping us to know our body, develop laterality, know the space / time relationship or body coordination and also helps prevent physical diseases, since it strengthens the immune system, and psychological because reinforces our self-concept.

For this it is important to include sport as a lifestyle in the family routine. In this way, adults and children will have it as a habit. It is very important that reinforcements are used in both victories and defeats (so as not to focus only on results), avoid pressure and get involved in training. But above all, it is important to enjoy, that everyone see it as a game and have a good time.