Mental resilience in sports -
Two examples of resilient players in football are Gareth Bale and Giovani Dos Santos. When Tottenham Hotspur first bought Gareth Bale from Southampton, he was regarded as a future prodigy.
Being young, he still had plenty of time to grow as a footballer, however his early days were clouded with criticism. He failed to live up to performance levels and to make matters worse Spurs had been associated with losing when Gareth Bale was in the team.
Two to three years later, he is now a renowned world class player who has the capabilities and attributes to be compared with the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. So what happened in that period of time? Although there is no documented evidence which would be extremely interesting to have observed , the logical answer would be his psychological capacity is of great quality and he dedicated a large amount of time to improving his game.
Over time Bale could have developed the relevant coping strategies to overcome those poor performances and any road blocks which were preventing him from achieving peak performance. It could be perceived Bale now has the mental integrity and talent to succeed at such a high level. These two examples offer implications to both coaches and psychologists.
The coaches must recognise the talent an individual possesses in order to improve performance levels, providing pressurised situations in training to help them develop their skills for when they are performing in a match.
Furthermore the two examples show the benefits for an individual possessing this attribute, specifically, overcoming adverse and tricky situations and being able to maintain high performance levels. From my experience, resilience is regarded as an extremely important quality for elite sports people to possess, therefore it would make sense to offer training scenarios and the support of a psychologist to assist with enhancing this within individuals.
From an educational perspective, to offer further insight into resilience, it would be extremely important to understand the underlying traits and specific components which amount to resilience.
Future research needs to involve observation of large elite sports groups to obtain a more thorough understanding of resilience, to see if traits vary within different sports. Remember, be a fierce competitor, find grace in all your victories and losses.
And I hope to see you out there. Maybe what you want is very simple, for everyone to just run in the right direction, score for their own team, to try and try again and again.
Maybe you want your athletes to become all stars. You want them to earn trophies, medals, win titles. You want them to reach the highest height their sport allows. But as every great coach discovers, developing a great athlete means nurturing, nurturing the even greater person within.
Truth is, you have even more influence than you know. You can be both the coach who provides the skills needed to win the game and the coach who helps them learn and succeed beyond the sport, to become all stars wherever they land in the future, and to enjoy their lives more now, because the confidence and courage they find working with you will stay with them when they need it the most.
There are games to be won, lives to change. Coaches have the power to do both. What kind of coach do you want to be? At first glance, dietary supplements look the same.
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Supplements that appear to be safe could actually be dangerous products in disguise. If you use dietary supplements without doing your research, you may be taking serious risks with your health and your career. Skip to content. Search Close this search box. Facebook X. com Logo formerly Twitter.
Youtube Instagram Linkedin Pinterest. Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram Linkedin Pinterest. How to Use Athlete Strengths to Build Mental, Physical, and Emotional Resilience. December 14, Mental Wellness. Coaches Educators Parents. ASK Patterson uses the acronym ASK when discussing youth mental health with coaches, teachers, and parents.
Simply put: Mindset and attitude matter when it comes to achieving your goals, including those related to athletic performance and fitness, says Tia Konzer, DO , a psychiatrist who specializes in sports psychology. Konzer, who serves on the advisory board of Professionals Beyond the Game , a nonprofit that supports and raises awareness about student athlete mental health, and whose current and past clients include NBA, NFL, and NHL players, NASCAR drivers, and American Olympians.
More specifically, coaches and athletes are putting more emphasis on mental toughness , also called grit, which the American Psychological Association APA defines as a personality trait marked by both perseverance and a passion for achieving long-term goals, characterized by the ability to overcome challenges and stay motivated in the face of failure, hardship, and plateaus.
In a Vogue essay, Serena Williams — who some think of as the greatest tennis player of all time — wrote about constantly being beaten by her sister, Venus, when they were growing up.
Simone Biles withdrew from the individual all-around gymnastics competition at the Olympic Games which most considered her a shoo-in to win , citing mental health struggles and too much pressure. That decision alone took plenty of mental strength, and after a two-year hiatus following the games, she came back to compete in the World Artistic Gymnastic Championships in October , taking home four gold medals and becoming the most decorated gymnast of all time, per USA Gymnastics.
The Olympic runner Deena Kastor told her story of transforming vulnerability and fear of failure into a positive in her book Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory. And she achieved more success in her sport as a result. It was after this mindset change that she became the first American woman to run a marathon in less than 2 hours and 20 minutes; and she became the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in the marathon in two decades.
Learning to persevere through tough times is key to all levels of athletic achievement. Despite the clear connection between mental toughness and athletic achievement, many athletes struggle to prioritize their mental health. To compete at a high level, athletes are taught to hone very specific skills, says Bradley Donohue, PhD , a distinguished professor of psychology at University of Nevada in Las Vegas UNLV , whose work focuses on performance optimization through mental health training.
Unfortunately, this means they may be similarly sensitive to criticism in other parts of their lives, which can lead to low self-esteem.
Athletes are under a lot of pressure to push themselves rigorously during training, day after day — and then perform at their very best as soon as the game, match, or race starts. That pressure gets amplified today thanks to technology and social media that connect the public with events happening everywhere, often in real time, explains Lani Lawrence, PsyD , the director of wellness and clinical services and the supervisor of player engagement and development for the New York Giants.
Thanks to social media, successes and failures are more public today than was the case for previous generations of athletes, she says.
It used to be that mistakes were only witnessed by those in attendance, unless a competition was televised. RELATED: Is Social Media Busting or Boosting Your Stress? For the vast majority of athletes, actual wins or first-place finishes are rare, while losses and second- or umpteenth-place results are much more common.
Feelings of "not measuring up" can be especially high in individual sports, adds Todd Wells , a cycling coach and former professional mountain bike racer based in Durango, Colorado who retired from the sport in at age Although mental health is a challenge for so many athletes, harmful and damaging stigmas surrounding mental health can be especially strong.
The culture around the athlete might view therapy as a sign of weakness, and student athletes may not be able to seek on-campus counseling anonymously, adds Dr.
Donohue, who competed in National Association of Police Athletic and Activities League boxing competitions during his college years. Now mental health professionals are often included on the staff of collegiate and professional teams, she says.
The International Olympic Committee released a consensus statement in , in an effort to improve mental health among elite athletes. Since then, top athletes like Naomi Osaka, Biles, and Michael Phelps have come forward about their own mental health struggles, paving the way for others to speak more openly about the mental and emotional challenges of sports.
Opening up the conversation not only reduces the stigma around mental health challenges in sports; it also highlights the importance of focusing on mental toughness as a way to protect against the stressors that athletes face. One review found that higher levels of mental toughness among athletes were associated with better performance, more progress toward goals, less stress, better coping skills, and more self-reflection.
Mental toughness also improved confidence, self-control, and positive thinking. Another study on young elite athletes found that those with higher mental toughness scores were less likely to experience mental health issues like burnout and depression when stress was high.
In other words, mental toughness may serve a dual purpose for athletes: It bolsters performance, while also negating some of the mental health issues that can come with competing at a high level.
At UNLV, Donohue completed a five-year study investigating a new mental health approach that he helped design specifically for athletes, focusing on optimization of sports performance rather than pathology, disorders, or mental illness.
Called the Optimum Performance Program in Sports TOPPS , the program recruits students who want to learn how to improve their sports performance by learning cognitive and behavioral skills.
Mental resilience in sports and desilience Dr. Brittany Patterson is Menta, faculty Fasting and detoxification with the Im Center for School Spprts Health at University of Maryland School of Mental resilience in sports, Department of Menyal Mental resilience in sports resiilience supports the mental health efforts of clinicians working in schools with young people from traditionally marginalized communities and under-resourced communities. Patterson explains that there are many strengths that influence feelings of happiness and ability to thrive—and that can help young athletes. Patterson recommends using the VIA Character Strengths survey to see more strengths, or even have older athletes use the questionnaire to determine their own strengths. Make consistent space to talk to your athletes —and listen. That should be the same for mental health. In sportz experience, Citrus aurantium for energy term resilience is becoming an Mental resilience in sports prominent resklience used within sport, whether it is rewilience relation to coaching, Mental resilience in sports or psychology. This Sports performance technology and tools partly due to rdsilience rise Mrntal use of positive psychology and the benefits it can have on well-being and vitality within individuals See Seligman for a full conceptualisation of positive psychology. The rationale behind positive psychology is to assist individuals in achieving happiness and allow them to flourish in their specific domain Seligman, In its simplest form, the idea is to focus on the strengths of an individual and how these can benefit their performance. There are many other components to this phenomenon, for example, optimism, vitality and self-determination.
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