Picture a performance under the lights and mentally play the perfect game."Technique, speed and tactical execution are crucial components of winning soccer, but it is mental toughness that marks out the very best players - the ability to play when pressure is highest, the opposition is strongest, and fear is greatest. Top players and coaches understand the importance of sport psychology in soccer but how do you actually train your mind to become the best player you can be?Soccer Tough demystifies this crucial side of the game and offers practical techniques that will enable soccer players of all abilities to actively develop focus, energy, and confidence. Soccer Tough will help banish the fear, mistakes, and mental limits that holds players back. Soccer psychology consultant Dan Abrahams shares the powerful techniques that have helped him develop reserve team players to become international players, and guided youth team players from slumps to first team contracts.Covering the mental triumphs of some of the world's leading players - Soccer Tough will help you become the best player you can be. Soccer Tough is for amateur and professional players of all levels, as well as coaches. This book explores how the best soccer players in the world think and gives the reader step-by-step ways to do the same.

    In and out of institutions for the greater part of his youth; Josh, a wild teenager, falls into a rollercoaster romance with Isabel, a Southern jewel, who drives him to search for purpose in professional Mixed Martial Arts. As Isabel marches towards personal battles of her own, Josh fights his way from local MMA circuits to front and center of FOX's The Ultimate Fighter TV show. After losing the most important bout of Josh's career, the pair rekindle their love, and seek to find strength in each other. With a penchant for raw and heartfelt honesty, Samman chronicles a gut-wrenching story of love, loss, and what it means to conquer life's greatest tragedies. The Housekeeper is an intimate look into the world of a man fighting for redemption.

    Built by an eccentric owner, molded by a visionary coach and loaded with hardscrabble miners, college All Americans and the sky's the limit ethos of the Roaring Twentys, the Maroons did the unthinkable and dominated the NFL in their rookie season. (Their improbable rise was chronicled each week in the local paper by a rookie Pottsville sportswriter named John OOHara.)Little Pottsville outscored its first seven opponents 162-6. The boys so thoroughly pummeled one opponent, angry fans shot up their train car as the Maroons rode out of town. In the final game of that first season the Maroons traveled to the Midwest to face the league-leading Chicago Cardinals in what was viewed as the championship game for 1925. The Maroons overcame a Windy City snowstorm and an injury to their best player to defeat the Cardinals 21-7.But the fans wanted more.College ball was still king. And as news of PottsvilleOs success was splashed across the news reels and headlines throughout the country, a movement began to have the Maroons face a team of college All-Stars from the University of Notre Dame, featuring the legendary Four Horsemen, the finest collection of talent the game had ever known. Experts believed the NFL was still decades away from competing with college football. But on a neutral field in Philadelphia, in a battle described as The Greatest Football Game Ever Seen, the Maroons shocked the world and turned the football establishment upside-down, defeating Notre Dame 9-7 on a last-second field goal by their captain Charlie Berry who had his kicking cleat bronzed for eternity.The championship was theirs. The NFL was finally on the map. The Maroons victory over Notre Dame had legitimized the league. It also destroyed the town and the team that made it all possible.Claiming the upstart Maroons had violated the territory of another franchise by playing Notre Dame in Philadelphia, the NFL suspended Pottsville and awarded the 1925 NFL championship to the Chicago Cardinals. The Cardinals refused to accept the bogus title and the 1925 crown was never officially awarded. For more than 80 years, fans of the Pottsville MaroonsNthe team Red Grange said was the greatest he ever facedNhave fought to have the 1925 title returned to its rightful owners.With Breaker Boys their remarkable story is told at last.

    

    Millions of fans from Montreal to Miami and Edmonton to Anaheim attend NHL games leach year, millions more watch on TV and the league pays its best players multi-million annual salaries.Over the course of its first century, the NHL's fortunes have ebbed and flowed. It has experienced setbacks and triumphs and innumerable crises. The league has awarded many franchises only to see some of them falter, fail and fold. The board of governors - which has included rich eccentrics and at least one future convict - has sometimes been fractured by men who loathed each other. How on earth has the NHL survived? The answer lies in the remarkable fact that it has had only five presidents and one commissioner. Two of these chiefs were stop-gaps. For the balance of league's ninety-plus years, four men have shaped and guided its fortunes and controlled the tough, hard-nosed, sometimes unruly owners who constituted the board of governors.      This is the story of two perpetual struggles -- the one on the ice and the one going on behind the scenes to keep the whole enterprise afloat. D'Arcy Jenish was granted unprecedented access to previously unpublished league files, including revelatory minutes of board meetings, and conducted dozens of hours of interviews with league executives, including commissioner Gary Bettman and former president John Ziegler, as well as well as owners, coaches, general managers and player representatives. He now reveals for the first time the true story behind some of the most significant events of the contemporary era.     This is a definitive, revelatory chonicle that no serious hockey fan will want to be without.

    Jack H. Wilmore, Dr. David Costill, W. Larry Kenney

    Yet surprisingly, for many, a desire to go faster is much more important than a desire to win. Someone who wants to go faster will work at the details and take small steps rather than focusing on winning. Winning just happens when you do everything right-it's the doing everything right that's hard. And that's what fascinates and obsesses Michael Hutchinson.With his usual deadpan delivery and an awareness that it's all mildly preposterous, Hutchinson looks at the things that make you faster-training, nutrition, the right psychology-and explains how they work, and how what we know about them changes all the time. He looks at the things that make you slower, and why, and how attempts to avoid them can result in serious athletes gradually painting themselves into the most peculiar life-style corners.Faster is a book about why cyclists do what they do, about what the riders, their coaches and the boffins get up to behind the scenes, and about why the whole idea of going faster is such an appealing, universal instinct for all of us.

    Roger Federer is a legend not only in the world of tennis but also in the wider sporting arena. With a record-breaking tally of 16 Grand Slam titles to his name, he shows no sign of slowing down and in 2010 added another Australian Open win to his collection, as well as taking the trophy in the end-of-season ATP World Wide Tour Finals in London. This authoritative and affectionate biography traces the rise of Federer, from his first tentative strokes with a tennis racket to how he dealt with being sent away to a training academy where he struggled to communicate in a French-speaking part of Switzerland; and how he handled the sudden death of his first real coach and mentor. It looks at his development as a sportsman and how he has matured into a family man with his marriage to Mirka Vavrinec and the birth of their twin girls. It also examines how Roger bounced back from arguably one of the most challenging periods of his career as, following a serious illness and a dip in form, his run of successive Wimbledon championship wins was ended and he was toppled from the number one spot by his long-time rival Rafael Nadal. In characteristic style, Federer silenced his critics by winning the French Open title for the first time, reclaiming his Wimbledon crown and ending 2009 at the number one position for the fifth time.

    Who could help it? Here was a young woman who, just a few months earlier, had weighed in at 340 pounds on the hit ABC show Extreme Weight Loss. Now for all the world to see—and merely part way into her one-year effort to pare down—she’d (literally) gone further than she’d ever expected. From barely being able to walk up the stairs to running 26.2 miles in practically no time? The body is an amazing thing. And yet … it’s no match for the brain. It wasn’t the strength of Meredith’s body propelling her across the Niagara Falls finish line—it was the power of her mind.               No one knows that better than JD Roth, who as the number one producer of TV weight loss shows has helped countless overweight people change their bodies—and lives—for the better. Viewers of Extreme Weight Loss, The Biggest Loser, The Revolution and other transformational shows have seen the “technicians”—the trainers, the nutritionists, the doctors, and other health pros who appear on-screen—but they’ve never seen the heart and soul behind these amazing makeovers. That would be JD, whose production company not only created weight loss television, but who has produced more episodes in the genre than all other producers combined. He’s the behind-the-scenes wizard who gets inside the heads of the shows’ participants, encouraging, persuading, prodding, and inspiring them to succeed. Intimately involved in casting the shows’ contestants, then seeing them through the weight loss process, he’s the guy whose picture they tape onto their elliptical trainers and angrily scream at each night—then hug out of gratitude the next morning. He’s the guy who holds them when they cry and the one who tells them they need to get back on the treadmill even though they’re crying. JD is the shows’ tough-love dad—love being the operative word. Because it’s not just TV to JD; he’s on a mission to change people’s lives. Every fat person (yes, “fat person”—there’ll be no sugarcoating here) knows that you need to move more and eat less to shed pounds. Not exactly rocket science. Yet that simple formula doesn’t get to the root of what makes someone top out at 500 pounds, or sometimes just carry an extra fifty. The missing link in transformative weight loss is mental and emotional fortitude. Mining the same problem-solving and motivational skills JD has used so successfully with reality show contestants, The Big Fat Truth gets readers to address the real reasons they’re overweight (and nobody gets away with saying it’s because they love food). With his combination of enthusiasm, empathy, no-holds-barred style, and master story-telling abilities, JD helps them unearth and tackle the unresolved issues they’ve buried under the French fries and chocolate chip cookie. Presented in three parts, The Big Fat Truth includes short straight-to-the-point chapters that help readers identify their real issues, create their own reality show, and then shake up their lives to do the impossible. Included throughout are inspiring stories, advice, and before-and-after photos from people JD has helped to lose weight (both on camera and off), along with quick tips for how to stay accountable and a 30-day plan for putting this advice into action.

    I chose to race, so I chose to win.' For 14 years between 1965 and 1978, cyclist Edouard Louis Joseph Merckx simply devoured his rivals, their hopes and their careers. His legacy resides as much in the careers he ruined as the 445 victories - including five Tour de France wins and all the monument races - he amassed in his own right. So dominant had Merckx become by 1973 that he was ordered to stay away from the Tour for the good of the event.Stage 17 of the 1969 Tour de France perfectly illustrates his untouchable brilliance. Already wearing the yellow jersey on the col du Tourmalet, the Tour's most famous peak, Merckx powered clear and rode the last 140 kilometres to the finish-line in jaw-dropping solitude, eight minutes ahead of his nearest competitor.Merckx's era has been called cycling's Golden Age. It was full of memorable characters who, at any other time, would all have gone on to become legends. Yet Merckx's phenomenal career overshadowed them all. How did he achieve such incredible success? And how did his rivals really feel about him? Merckx failed drug tests three times in his career - were they really stitch ups as he claimed? And what of the crash at a track meet in Blois, France that killed Merckx's pacer Fernand Wambst, which Merckx claimed deeply affected him psychologically and physically? Or the attack by a spectator in 1975?Despite his unique achievements, we know little about the Cannibal beyond his victories. This is the first comprehensive biography of Merckx in English, and finally exposes the truth behind this legendary man.

    This groundbreaking manual on Systema Breathing presents step-by-step training drills given to you in a thorough and comprehensive way. You will learn the unique methodology of Systema Breathing and get the foundation for every physical activity of your daily life. Whether you are looking to raise your athletic skills to the next level, or wish to increase your potential and to enjoy life, this is your tool to uncover the endless reserve of energy, health and happiness. At the same time, it is very easy reading, full of entertaining stories and thought provoking ideas.

    Then he discovered the mountains. Making up for lost time, Bullock soon became one of Britain's best climbers, learning his trade in Scotland and Wales, before travelling from Pakistan to Peru.

     Make Your Dream Body A Reality From the world’s leading online fitness site Bodybuilding.com comes a revolutionary 12-week diet and exercise program—supported by two million members and thousands of real-life success stories. The Bodybuilding.com Guide to Your Best Body presents a plan that promotes health from the inside out, starting first with the mental blocks that are holding you back, progressing to the muscles on your body, and finally to the food on your plate. Rather than subtracting things from your life (cutting calories, losing weight, banishing your belly), here’s how to add more of the RIGHT things: more muscle, more support, and more success. On this plan, you will: • GET AND STAY MOTIVATED. Identify your “Transformation Trigger” and create a system of radical accountability in your life—whether your goal is to lose 30 pounds of fat or gain 30 pounds of muscle. • EXERCISE FOR OPTIMUM RESULTS with a fully illustrated, 3-stage exercise routine. By changing your routine often, you will “shock” your body into doing more than you ever thought you could. • EAT CLEAN TO GET LEAN with simple, inexpensive, and delicious recipes. Supercharge your metabolism and keep hunger under control. With this book, you’ll learn the optimal balance of weight training, cardiovascular exercise, and nutrition that have helped people achieve dramatic, lasting results. Join the “Transformation Nation” and create your own story that will inspire others—with The Bodybuilding.com Guide to Your Best Body.

    Through a lifetime of research, he has developed key scientific concepts in sport that have not only redefined the way elite athletes and teams approach their professions, but challenged conventional global thinking in these areas.In this new and updated edition of Challenging Beliefs, Noakes gives his views on everything from overtraining, banned substances and the dangers of rugby to the sports-drink industry, and children and sport, debunking a few sporting myths in the process. Stories and case studies of the teams and athletes with whom he has worked are also included. In providing an intimate look at the golden threads running through Noakes's life and career, this truly fascinating book reveals the groundbreaking theories and principles generated by one of the greatest minds in the history of sports science.