The Benefits of Sports Psychology for Athletes

image was taken from jeremythiel.blogspot.com. in the pic is Lindsey Smith, 5th place finisher at the 2009 Crossfit Games.

The Benefits of Sports Psychology for Athletes

Patrick J. Cohn

Mental Game Coaching is that the segment of sports psychology that concentrates specifically on helping athletes break through the mental barriers that are keeping them from performing up to their peak potential.
By focusing on the mental skills needed to be successful in any sporting competition, mental game coaching seeks to achieve the overall goal of performance improvement.
Sports Psychology is about improving your attitude and mental game skills to help you perform your best by identifying limiting beliefs and embracing a healthier philosophy about your sport. Below is a list of the top ten ways that you can benefit from sports psychology:
Improve focus and deal with distractions. Many athletes have the ability to concentrate, but often their focus is displaced on the wrong areas such as when a batter thinks "I need to get a hit" while in the batter’s box, which is a result-oriented focus. Much of my instruction on focus deals with helping athlete to stay focused on the present moment and let go of results.
Grow confidence in athletes who have doubts. Doubt is the opposite of confidence. If you maintain many doubts prior to or during your performance, this indicates low self-confidence or at least you are sabotaging what confidence you had at the start of the competition. Confidence is what I call a core mental game skill because of its importance and relationship to other mental skills.
Develop coping skills to deal with setbacks and errors. Emotional control is a prerequisite to getting into the zone. Athletes with very high and strict expectations, have trouble dealing with minor errors that are a natural part of sports. It’s important to address these expectations and also help athletes stay composed under pressure and when they commit errors or become frustrated.

1. Find the right zone of intensity for your sport. I use intensity in a broad sense to identify the level of arousal or mental activation that is necessary for each person to perform his or her best. This will vary from person to person and from sport to sport. Feeling “up” and positively charged is critical, but not getting overly excited is also important. You have to tread a fine line between being excited to complete, but not getting over-excited.
2. Help teams develop communication skills and cohesion. A major part of sports psychology and mental training is helping teams improve cohesion and communication. The more a team works as a unit, the better the results for all involved.
3. To instill a healthy belief system and identify irrational thoughts. One of the areas I pride myself on is helping athlete identify ineffective beliefs and attitudes such as comfort zones and negative self-labels that hold them back from performing well. These core unhealthy beliefs must be identified and replaced with a new way of thinking. Unhealthy or irrational beliefs will keep you stuck no matter how much you practice or hard you try.
4. Improve or balance motivation for optimal performance. It’s important to look at your level of motivation and just why you are motivated to play your sport. Some motivators are better in the long-term than others. Athletes who are extrinsically motivated often play for the wrong reasons, such as the athlete who only participates in sports because of a parent. I work with athlete to help them adopt a healthy level of motivation and be motivated for the right reasons.
5. Develop confidence post-injury. Some athletes find themselves fully prepared physically to get back into competition and practice, but mentally some scars remain. Injury can hurt confidence, generate doubt during competition, and cause a lack of focus. I help athletes mentally heal from injuries and deal with the fear of re-injury.
6. To develop game-specific strategies and game plans. All great coaches employ game plans, race strategies, and course management skills to help athletes mentally prepare for competition. This is an area beyond developing basic mental skills in which a mental coach helps athletes and teams. This is very important in sports such as golf, racing, and many team sports.
7. To identify and enter the “zone” more often. This incorporates everything I do in the mental side of sports. The overall aim is to help athletes enter the zone by developing foundational mental skills that can help athletes enter the zone more frequently. It’s impossible to play in the zone everyday, but you can set the conditions for it to happen more often.

I will add that sport psychology may not be appropriate for every athlete. Not every person who plays a sport wants to "improve performance." Sport psychology is probably not for recreation athletes who participate for the social component of a sport or do not spend time working on technique or fitness to improve performance. Young athletes whose parents want them to see a sports psychologist are not good candidate either. It’s very important that the athlete desires to improve his or her mental game without having the motive to satisfy a parent.Similarly, an athlete who sees a mental game expert only to satisfy a coach is not going to fully benefit from mental training.
Sports Psychology does apply to a wide variety of serious athletes. Most of my students (junior, high school, college, and professional athletes) are highly committed to excellence and seeing how far they can go in sports. They love competition and testing themselves against the best in their sport. They understand the importance of a positive attitude and mental toughness. These athletes want every possible advantage they can get including the mental edge over the competition.

About The Author
Dr. Patrick J. Cohn is a sports psychology expert and master mental game coach who works with athletes of all levels including amateur and professionals. Visit Peaksports.com to gain access to over 500 exclusive mental game articles, audio programs, and interviews with athletes and coaches to enhance your athletic potential:
www.peaksports.com/membership or call 888-742-7225

This Guy get's me fired up!

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With One you Must Have the Other

Don't Bet Against Lance Armstrong.....

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Lance Armstrong
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

....because you'll lose 99% of the time!

“Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”

 Mario Andretti 

Any guy that's not working with the same amount of intensity and passion that I do, I don't want to know.
Zakk Wylde


WOD  I AM Crossfit Challenge

3 Rds

400m Run
15 pull ups
7 135lb HC


Time 7:10

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Genetic Tests of Athletic Prowess — For Babies

• By Brandon Keim 

A new genetic test offers to predict the sports at which a baby will someday excel. But even if the science were sound — it’s not — this might not be a good idea.
The $150 test, offered by Colorado-based Atlas Sports Genetics, looks at ACTN3, a gene that codes for fast-twitch muscle fiber. People with lots of fast-twitching muscle are ostensibly suited for "burst" sports like football or sprinting. Those with slow-twitch muscles ought to be better at endurance sports.
"Finding any great Olympic athlete normally takes years to determine," proclaims the company’s website. "What if we knew a part of the answer when we were born?"
But sporting achievement isn’t that simple. Theodore Friedmann, a University of California-San Diego gene therapist, told the New York Times that the test was "an opportunity to sell new versions of snake oil."
Hundreds of genes have been implicated in athletic success. ACTN3 is just one of these. (Sure, Jamaicans have disproportionately high levels of ACTN3 — but if that explains their Olympic dominance in 2008, what about their poor showing in 2004?)
These genes have yet to be connected with those other, equally important predictors of success, which go by the unscientific names  of "heart" and "smarts." A perfect example is Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia: slow, small, weak and fabulously successful.
"This kid can’t run. He’s not very strong. He’s 5′4", or whatever he is on a good day. He doesn’t have much fast twitch. He’s just a ballplayer," said his college baseball coach, Pat Murphy, in a Boston Globe story on Pedroia’s winning the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award.

But even if ACTN3 testing was completely accurate, able to predict athletic success before a baby had graduated from bottle-feeding to Gatorade, would it be desirable?  Becoming a professional athlete is only a little more realistic than becoming a rock star. Which isn’t to say people shouldn’t strive — but reaching the pinnacle is less important than the process itself.
The benefits of childhood sports take many forms: how to be a good teammate. Learning to perform under pressure. The satisfaction and self-confidence of overcoming adversity. The value of practice and self-discipline. Most important of all is simple fun. If a child doesn’t enjoy a sport, he or she should do something else.
Reading about the Atlas Sports Genetics test reminded me of a conversation I overheard last year at a local coffee shop. Two new parents were talking with a friend about what sport their baby boy would play. Basketball and football were out of the question, dad said: he’d never be big enough to succeed. The friend suggested tennis, but mom said that traveling across the country for high-level tournaments was too expensive.
The parents seemed like nice, thoughtful and genuinely supportive people. It just hadn’t occurred to them that their son might be fine picking a sport he liked, and playing it for fun.



My workout for the day:

5x max strict pull-ups 16,11,9,7,8
Power Cleans 135x3,185,195,205,215,225x3

5rds
10 True Pushups
10 Ring Dips
10 GHD Situps
Time 7:15....ring dips need improvement

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Indomitable Will

this article was taken from zen habits.net

Three Effective Ways to Enhance Your Willpower

Discipline is like a muscle. Work it out.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Ian Newby-Clark of My Bad Habits.
Control yourself!” We all say it, mostly to ourselves. We say it when we ‘indulge’ in behaviors that cause short-term gain for long-term pain. And guilt. I cite many of the usual suspects: eating the wrong things, being lazy, staying up too late, drinking too much. There are others, of course. Why do we do such things? After all, aren’t we entirely in control of ourselves all of the time?
Nope.
Research tells us that willpower is a limited resource. Each of us only has so much of it. The studies demonstrating this are rather ingenious. I will share one of my favorites with you, though there are many more.
You are a student at a mid-Western university and you are in a psychology experiment apparently concerned with taste-testing. The experimenter seats you at a table. In front of you is a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. There is also a plate of radishes. Your stomach is growling because, as instructed, you didn’t eat anything last night.
The experimenter asks you to taste-test the radishes. You are not to taste the cookies. In fact, don’t even touch them! No cookies for you! Next, the experimenter asks you to help out another experimenter with a puzzle experiment. You start working on the puzzle. It’s rather hard …
Times passes …
You are having trouble solving the puzzle. Undeterred, you press on.
More time passes …
You still can’t solve the puzzle! You sometimes get close, but then you make a mistake and start over. Eventually, you give up. When the experiment is over, you learn a couple of interesting facts. First, the two experiments, taste-testing and puzzle-solving, were related. Those sneaky psychologists! Second, some people taste-tested the cookies. Lucky ducks!
Persisting at the frustratingly difficult puzzle takes willpower. But will the radish-eaters and cookie-eaters have the same amount of willpower? The experimenters think that the radish-eaters have less will-power than the cookie-eaters because the radish-eaters had to resist grabbing a cookie. So, the radish-eaters should give up on the puzzle sooner than the cookie-eaters. That’s what happened.
That study, and dozens of others like it, show that people only have so much willpower. When you have to control yourself, there is less willpower available to you for other parts of your life. This fact is a good one to know because people who lose their will-power often do things that they would rather not. They become aggressive, sexually impulsive, and give up too early on puzzles.
This has nothing to do with being physically tired. Your self-control is at low ebb when you are mentally exhausted. So, what lessons can we learn from what the science is telling us? How can we be in more and better control of ourselves more often? I have three tips:
1. Anticipate and plan for your times of low self-control. Now that you know that self-control is a limited resource and that depleting it means less for later, you can do some anticipating and planning. For example, make sure that you’re not in the chips and cookies aisle of the grocery store after a long day at work. Don’t start on your tax return after a frustrating commute.
2. Exercise your willpower muscle to get more of it. Roy Baumeister, one of the leading researchers in this field, thinks that willpower is like a muscle. Exercising a muscle in the short-term leads to its exhaustion. In the long-term, though, exercising a muscle causes it to grow. In fact, there is some good evidence that exercising your willpower, though temporarily depleting, means that it will be stronger in the long run. So, push yourself. Things to do that will deplete your willpower:

• Work on a tough to solve puzzle;
• Watch a funny movie but resist the urge to laugh;
• Watch a sad movie but resist the urge to cry.

3. Drink some orange juice. It turns out that glucose is one of the key ingredients that your brain needs for effective self-control. Willpower. It’s not just for breakfast anymore!
I hope that you find my message enlightening and helpful. Some of you, I am sure, will be disappointed to learn that your capacity for self-control is less than infinite. You do have willpower, just not as much as you might like. But now you know how to get more!

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will. Mahatma Gandhi

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Intensity

Taken directly from Crossfit Football...

Gaining The Mental Edge Part II: Intensity
© Winning Edge Psychological Services, LLC

Intensity in competition is sought by athletes and desired by coaches. An intense athlete performs with purpose, single mindedness, and laser focused energy. One common misconception surrounding intensity is that there is a magical point of intensity that leads all athletes to great performances. This mistaken belief can lead coaches to giving the classic pre-game pep-talk to get the team psyched up. Unfortunately, the pre-game talk may help some athletes while annoying others. Research in the field of sport psychology has found that intensity exists at an optimal zone that is individual to each athlete. Each person has his/her level or zone of intensity where he/she performs best. Optimal intensity refers to the ideal level of physical and mental intensity that allows an athlete to perform his/her best (Taylor & Wilson, 2005).

One common reason that athletes seek out a sports psychologist is because they experience over intensity. Over intensity involves too much emotional, mental and physical energy. The athlete doubts his/her ability, focuses upon mistakes, feels nervous/anxious, feels stiff and has difficulty moving, and overall cannot perform as he/she does in practice. In essence, the overly intense athlete melts down. Although less common than over intensity, under intensity is when an athlete feels over confident, does not view a game as important, has low energy and low motivation to compete. In the under intensity scenario, the athlete may be playing down in a match or game where he/she expects to easily win. The good news is that sports psychology research has developed specific techniques to help the athlete over come both over-intensity and under-intensity.

When working with the over intense athlete, I first want the athlete to understand what is biologically happening to his/her thoughts, emotions, and body. Understanding what causes over intensity allows the athlete to understand his/her self and is the first step in regaining control. Comparison of past successful and unsuccessful performances offers initial insights into how the athlete behaves differently at different times. Together with their sports psychologist, the athlete looks for thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that lead to strong performances. Examining past performances also provides insight into what the athlete is thinking, feeling, and doing when he/she performs poorly. Armed with new knowledge about his/her performance, the athlete will develop a pre-competition routine that includes several key components. First the athlete will learn and practice the physical skills of deep breathing and muscle relaxation. The practiced skills of deep breathing and muscle relaxation allow the athlete to regain control of his/her body, which in turn stops them from fearing that he/she will lose control (of his/her thoughts, feelings, and body). Deep breathing and muscle relaxation need to become integrated into the athlete's daily practice routine.

Second, confidence skills that we discussed in Part I of Gaining The Mental Edge are integrated into the athletes daily practice routine and pre-game routine. Layering the perspective of confidence with positive thought skills directs the athlete to focused performance. Third the athlete needs to develop and then engage imagery of positive, focused, performance. Imagery often involves dipping into his/her positive image bank of past success to see and feel his/her past successes. Imagery (often called visualization) is not magical; it is a research based skill used to enhance athletic performance. The use of directed imagery before competition can help an athlete place his/her self closer to their optimal zone of intensity. Imagery will work if the athlete regularly uses imagery as part of his/her practice routine.

Fourth, athletes develop and enhance positive thought skills in order to effectively direct his/her focus. The use of positive thought skills keeps the athletes focused in the moment, reducing the possibility that his/her thoughts will drift to unproductive worry. The ability to re-direct focus during competition; remain on task and think positive is critical to optimal intensity. Finally, a sense of humor, an ability to laugh, smile and loosen up before a competition can be priceless. A coach, teammate, or family member's ability to help a tense athlete smile, and laugh can instantly shift the athlete from over-intense to a positive, relaxed and ready state.

The under intensity athlete requires a different direction of focus. Often the under intense athlete is not mentally or physically ready to take on a lesser opponent. The under intense athlete believes he/she should easily win, and underestimates the competitive task. Learning to direct focus in competition to personal goals and excellent technique helps the under intense athlete maintain focus. Directing focus to his/her technique, provides the athlete with concrete goals, and directs his/her intensity. Second, the under intense athlete needs to remember that he/she once beat higher ranked teams/players, and that every game/match matters. Consistency of performance is a developmental goal, and learning to focus intensity for every game/match is work. Intensity and consistency are mental skills that need to be practiced as much as physical skills do. Roger Federer (number one ranked men's tennis player in the world), perceives every match he plays as equally important. By maintaining this mindset, Federer is incredibly consistent and on his way to accruing a winning record that may see him become the most dominant male player in the history of tennis.

Confidence and intensity are work! No one will give them to your team or you. It is up to you as the athlete or coach to build them. Confidence and intensity are your job! Learn to build and maintain them and you will see your game rise to a new level.

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Tarzan

The kids and I watched Tarzan today, and I can't stop thinking about it! Me Tarzan....over and over in my head! The closer we get to becoming like Tarzan the better. Stop being soft.. stop being absorbed by materialistic things. We need to Fight for what we believe in, put family first.... throw away your T.V., play outside, limit the amount of time you spend on the computer. The closer we get to our primal roots the better. Keep in mind I do not believe we originated from gorillas, but since God did create everything, doesn't that make us all family?! Point is, another calender year has come and gone and I for one would rather be swinging through trees then watching T.V. dying a slow death....Use it or Lose it.



There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

- Albert Einstein

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2010...this is

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