Posted on

Long Season Approaches Part II: Young Athletes

As youth become more specialized in their sport the demands for competing continuously year-round are extreme. I know this personally as transitioning to collegiate athletics required multiple surgical procedures to have the chance to continue to compete. It is understandable that you must sacrifice to put yourself in the best position to be seen, recruited, drafted, and achieve your goals, but there is a cost and a fine line between pushing yourself and pushing it too far.

Knowing that a potentially under-developed body is going to be pushed to its limits, youth athletes must try to get ahead of the game. Begin building up support strength and endurance in sport-specific high-use areas. For instance, shoulder stability, core strength and stability, and sprint power in baseball as well as tennis. Golf athletes should continuously improve on trunk stability, core strength, and flexibility to support and prevent lower back injuries. Athletes must listen and respond to their bodies, not ignore signals our body sends to us in response to what we put it through.

Additionally, parents of youth athletes should take it upon themselves to continuously get honest feedback on their child’s health status and responses to play. From a developing athlete’s perspective, knowing your parents care more about your health than the wins and losses on the playing field can have many positive side effects.

Effort in the beginning is key and pays off in the end. Rehabilitation and injury-prevention exercises are tedious. However, take the opportunity to make it a challenge for yourself, monitor your self-talk and make thought changes to help stay positive, motivated, and process-oriented. Like I always say, find the fun! Get support by having teammates complete exercises with you. Get your family involved and challenge them to complete as many reps as you. Do what you can, while you can to get ahead of continuous breakdown on the body. Take care of what you have to adapt and accomplish!

Let it fly,

TK

Let us know what you think!

Posted on

Sport Psychology Work With Injured Athletes: The Prime Time!

Is working with a mental coach or sport psychology consultant while you are injured going to help you at all? The answer is an astounding YES! The research is classifying athlete’s responses to injury into three phases: (1) response to injury, (2) response to rehabilitation, and (3) response to return-to-play (Kamphoff et al., 2013). When broken down, an athlete has different mental and physical challenges for each distinct phase of injury response with the addition of more time to focus on the mental side of performing.

What is nice is the same mental skills that athletes are taught and use for performance enhancement in sport can successfully be applied to rehabilitation. For instance, realistic yet challenging goals, the ability to leverage self-talk to enhance confidence, improve focus, motivate yourself, and control emotions, and especially incorporating a powerful imagery training regimen will not only help in the rehabilitation process, but it will stave off rust from lack of play and create an opportunity to actually grow as a more complete athlete.

More importantly, working with a sport psychology consultant can help with the mental reactions of loss. All athletes combat negative and unproductive thoughts, but some struggle more than others. Redirecting our energy into growing and improving in different ways is more productive and is what a consultant can help guide athletes to accept and act on.

Thus, sport psychology work during injury is actually a great time to start or heavily continue to work with a professional. Hopefully it will be an important step in building the foundation to more complex and consistent mental training and optimal performance. Keep adapting, keep improving, and keep accomplishing in every situation life throws at you.

Let it fly,

TK

 

Let us know what you think!

Posted on

Long Season Mental Approach Tips

With spring comes the end of winter sports and the kick off of baseball throughout the country. How can athletes prepare for the onslaught and sheer length that is 162 games, maybe more if they are lucky? Here are my thoughts to make tackling the mental approach for the long haul more effective.

  1. Find fun and be yourself. The best opportunity to not only perform optimally but to bring that level of performance day in and day out is to enjoy the process involved with training, preparing, and performing. Find what about the game most intrigues you, how fortunate you are, and explore how you can give yourself more enjoyment. Do this while being your true self. We are most happy when we can just be us and do what we love to do.
  2. Have clear goals. Don’t burn yourself out with monotony. Challenge yourself in different ways and continue to grow as an athlete and human. This will keep you motivated, build confidence with every goal you attain, and provide learning opportunities for you to understand how you best improve.
  3. Balance long-term (LT) and short-term (ST) mindsets. There are pros and cons to thinking in the LT and ST. The skill is knowing when to leverage each one. Thinking in the LT is beneficial when you need the big picture or the culmination of your efforts to motivate you. I also harp of leveraging LT thinking when coming off setbacks. At the beginning of the season, you have such a long time to adjust and improve. At the end, you can rely on a season of successful performances to help bulldoze through ST failures. ST mindsets is where athletes should live! ST thinking provides more sense of control, clearer performance feedback, and allows you to focus more on the process of performing every second. Win every play.
  4. Manage your energy. Our physical and mental energy is a finite resource. Find ways to recreationally recharge, doing things you enjoy and potentially could provide active recovery. I challenge athletes to explore and incorporate long-term energy control strategies like autogenic training, progressive relaxation, meditation, diaphragmatic breathing, yoga, and imagery training.
  5. Take a snapshot of how opening day feels. I remind athletes to take inventory of how opening day is so they can go back and use that experience as fuel when they need it. Opening day is exciting, motivating, full of possibility and positivity. Shouldn’t every day be this way?
  6. Build on successes. All sports, not just baseball, are so stat-heavy that we judge others and ourselves on batting averages, ERAs, OB%, and first-pitch strikes. When we do not fulfill these categories adequately we tend to see our performance and the day as a failure. What is ignored is all the things you did right that day. Most likely 96% of your tasks you completed with flying colors. Don’t ignore it.
  7. Connect with those around you. It is a long season. Everyone needs others to lean on not just in times of stress and struggle but social support and the sense of connection within a team actually improves everyone’s ability to perform better.