Flexing the mind is key to lifting sports trophies
• The game is being fought on the field and inside the athlete’s head
England entered the World Cup final as overwhelming favourites. Not in the minds of the Springboks, but in the minds of most people in the world, even former winners of rugby’s highest accolade.
“Well, at the risk of sounding like an arrogant @EnglandRugby fan. Nothing I am seeing would worry England. Very predictable,” tweeted 2003 England World Cup winner Lewis Moody when the Boks scraped past Wales in the semifinal.
His words were important, because he had won the trophy before. A few days later, when he retweeted an interview he had done, the seriousness of the mental state of sports players entering big games hit home. He had told journalist Chris Devine of Omnisport: “You’re fighting a battle in your own brain until you cross that white line.”
Clinton Gahwiler, a sports psychologist who has run the psychology practice at the Sports Science Institute of SA since 1995, told Business Day: “I think we all have a tendency to make somewhat simplistic assumptions on what a specific sporting result can be attributed to. In reality, there are always a huge number of factors which play a role on any given day, and thankfully it is impossible for us to know, let alone control, them all. That’s partly why sport exists and why it is such a great thing.
“So, did the teams’ ability to handle pressure on the day ultimately make the difference? I don’t know. Sporting excellence is about planning, and patiently implementing, and practising to implement, the plan over time.
“The World Cup final pitted two outstanding, thinking coaches against each other, who undoubtedly both left very little to chance in their preparations.”
Gahwiler dismissed a common misconception, often repeated on sports pages around the world. “Another simplistic deduction is that the one team wanted it more than the other. Well, obviously every player on the field wanted to win very badly and has quite possibly thought about it since they were kids.”
How did the Springboks rise to the occasion?
“One of the more important factors might have been that the Springboks did an excellent job of harnessing the emotion that comes from knowing what that game could mean for the country. And, unlike sports that rely on fine-motor skills, rugby is the kind of game in which that level of emotion can be channelled very powerfully.”
In his post-win media conference, Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus spoke about this emotion. He also said he had worked to instil a sense of perspective in his players and had explained that pressure in SA is not having a job, or having a family member murdered.
He said they worked as a team on understanding that rugby doesn’t create pressure, but instead was an opportunity and privilege.
One could argue for weeks whether this was just an important sense of perspective or whether it was a very smart tactic to help the Boks manage their pressure better than the English. Tries by both wings vs loose passes into touch: the one team was the headlight and the other team was the deer.
During the tournament and after the group games Erasmus was quoted as saying: “I personally experienced 1999 when I was a player and again in 2011 when I coached and we lost two important playoff games.
“Back then I thought it was because of the mental side that we lost. It wasn’t the physical side that lost us those games.
“It’s very important to be able to deal with the pressure. You have to look at how you handle pressure. What is pressure? And how can you transfer the pressure from your team onto the opposition.”
A few years ago, Forbes ran a feature on why successful people don’t crumble under pressure. The article quoted Martin Turner, a lecturer at Staffordshire University in the School of Psychology, Sport and Exercise. He is well known for writing the book What Business Can Learn from Sport Psychology: Ten Lessons for Peak Professional Performance.
Turner told Forbes at the time that extraordinary athletes have the ability to perform well under pressure. Two people, he said, with similar skills and preparation can perform very differently on the day.
His theory is that when entering a stressful situation, fear triggers a physiological response and a person enters two possible states: a challenge state, where they are able to respond positively, or a threat state, where their ability to focus and make decisions is hindered.
“How the body reacts under pressure is dictated by the mind,” Turner was quoted as saying in the article, which elaborates: “Entering into a stressful situation with a positive mental approach leads to a challenge state. But if you approach a tough situation with negativity, you’re more likely to enter into a threat state.”
Louise de Jager, owner of BMT Sports Consulting, which works with athletes to improve their performance, says: “If you can align mind and body, you will certainly improve performance. The mind has a massive effect on the body, which in turn has a massive effect on performance.”
De Jager, herself a former athlete, having represented SA at a national level in hockey, gymnastics and athletics, says: “Often, what happens to athletes is that they get into a state of overthinking, in that they are critical of themselves and they are analysing their thoughts all the time.
“You want to be in a state of flow where, yes, your mind has control, but your mind is calm. Overthinking has a detrimental effect on performance.”
Gahwiler says sports psychology optimises the mental aspects of sport. “You know yourself, your coach knows your sport, and the psychologist has information on optimising the mental aspects of the game. The challenge is to put these three sources of information together in a way that is practically useful when you go out to compete,” he says.
Gahwiler pointed Business Day to a mental coping checklist he created on his website called Performing Mind. “The aim of the Performing Mind coping checklist is to summarise those ‘boxes to be ticked’, in order to feel that you have genuinely done all you can with regards to a specific difficulty.”
On negative thinking, Gahwiler writes: “Thinking patterns become habits in the same way that physical mannerisms do … some of our habits serve us well, while others hold us back and create unnecessary stress.
“Just as our existing habits were learnt at some point in the past, so too we can develop new thinking habits.”
CLEAR GOALS
De Jager says even people who are amateurs, mildly competitive or are just trying to get the best out of their own training need to master their minds. The way we are able to do this, she says, is by setting very clear goals, followed by drawing up a progress report in order to maintain a sense of perspective of the bigger picture. Use your mind to try to create a state of positivity that will lead to resilience and confidence.
In a study called “From Mental Power to Muscle Power
— Gaining Strength by Using the Mind”, conducted by researchers from the department of biomedical engineering at The Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, the researchers set out to determine mental training-induced strength gains (without performing physical exercises) in the little finger abductor as well as in the elbow flexor muscles.
Thirty healthy volunteers took part for 12 weeks, one group performing “mental contractions” of little finger abduction, another doing mental contractions of elbow flexion, a third doing no exercise, and a group of people actually doing physical exercises related to the movements.
What would appear obvious is that the physically trained group enjoyed the biggest strength gains (more than 50%). However, the mental training groups enjoyed significant gains too, of 13.5% for elbow flexion and 35% for finger abduction strength.
The authors concluded that “the mental training employed by this study enhances the cortical output signal, which drives the muscles to a higher activation level and increases strength”.
Ditch the curl rack and flex the grey matter.
YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT HOW YOU HANDLE PRESSURE. AND HOW CAN YOU TRANSFER THE PRESSURE FROM YOUR TEAM ONTO THE OPPOSITION