In a few weeks,
millions of us will be glued to our TV sets,
watching the best athletes in the world ski, skate
and slide their way into Olympic history in Turin,
Italy.
We will certainly be
dazzled, as always, by the sheer physical skill of
these folks who have pushed their bodies so hard for
so many hours a day, year after year.
But just as important
as physical training, say those who study elite
athletes, is the mental training that goes into a
peak performance. If two athletes are equally fit,
the edge often goes to the one with the better
emotional skills -– not a do-or-die focus on
winning, but a set of habits that all of us can
learn, including positive “self talk,” maintaining
an energy level that is neither too excited nor too
relaxed and, perhaps most important, a Buddhist-like
ability to focus totally on the moment at hand, on
this particular breath, stroke, turn.
So useful are these
techniques that sport psychologists say their
coaching is increasingly being sought by surgeons,
trial lawyers, musicians, public speakers, business
people and others who need to perform at their best
in high stress situations. Partly because of this
increasing demand, the Association for the
Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology, the major
professional organization in the field, has grown
from a few hundred 20 years ago to 1,300 today, said
the group’s president, Craig Wrisberg, a sport
psychology professor and mental training consultant
at the University of Tennessee.
Nowhere has the
teaching of mental skills become a finer art than at
West Point, where Nate Zinsser, director of the
performance enhancement program, runs a
sophisticated lab that is the envy of sports teams
around the country. He's building better athletes
(Army must beat Navy) and also better soldiers, who
have imagined every possible thing that might go
wrong with a military operation. "You don't want to
experience anything for the first time in combat."
Among other things,
Zinsser has what he described as “very cool”
ergonomically designed chairs in which cadets sit
and, through biofeedback techniques like monitoring
heart rate, learn to relax and ignore potential
distractions -– such as crowd noise –- piped in
through speakers.
“The process of
training and learning to compete competently is a
much more valuable lifetime lesson than simply the
accomplishment of having won something on a given
day,” said Zinsser. The key, for Olympic athletes as
well as weekend warriors, is to learn to juggle two
contrasting disciplines. “You have to be almost an
obsessive-compulsive workaholic to get yourself
ready to be good. But then you have to be this
relaxed, Buddha-like Zen master, which allows all
the stuff you have been training to come out.”
In other words, you
train your body, especially your nervous system, so
that you can automatically do your best on every
step, jump, start or landing. Then you get your mind
and its anxious chatter out of the way, go on
“autopilot” and let your body “fly itself,” said Jim
Bauman, a sport psychologist for the US Olympic
Committee who has been working this year with the
men’s alpine ski team.
Naturally, you can’t
will yourself into the zone. But you can set the
stage for it, in an athletic event, public speaking
or any potentially stressful performance. Here’s
how:
§
Self
talk. If you find that you’re talking to yourself –
as opposed to being in a state of total, wordless
absorption in the moment – make it positive “self
talk,” said Jean Williams ,, a professor of
psychology at the University of Arizona and editor
of “Applied Sport Psychology: Personal Growth to
Peak Performance.”
Positive messages
like “Good job” or “Keep going” correlate with
better performance, according to a series of studies
on wrestlers, field hockey players, golfers,
cross-country skiers, divers, tennis players and
other athletes since the early 1990s. It also helps,
says Wayland triathlete Flo Chretien, 31, a 2008
summer Olympics hopeful, to mentally re-cast the
event positively, not as a stressor but “a reward
for all your training.”
§
Imagery. A number of studies have shown that people
who are taught to imagine themselves performing
exactly as they want to do better than those who
don’t get the imagery training. The most successful
athletes, studies have shown, use imagery more
extensively and systematically than less successful
ones.
§
Recovery after mistakes. “The people who win gold
medals are not those with no mistakes, but those
who are best at handling mistakes,” said Charlie
Brown, a sport psychologist in Charlotte, N.C. And
like everything else in sports or high stress
performance situations, the key is practice,
specifically practicing what you will do to handle
every imaginable kind of mistake, added Brown, who
will teach mental skills training to surgeons next
month.
§
Stay in
the present and focus on process, not outcome. In
stressful situations, most people focus on the end
result, said Aimee Kimball, director of mental
training at the Center for Sports Medicine at the
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center: It works
better, she said, “not to focus on the outcome, but
to focus on the process.”
