ABCs OF MENTAL TRAINING: R IS FOR RESILIENCY

BY AIMEE KIMBALL, PHD//MENTAL TRAINING CONSULTANT

Mental toughness is as much about our reaction to an event as it is our preparation for that event. There are going to be times when your race doesn’t go exactly as planned. There are going to be times when you fail, you struggle, or you have to return from injury. This newsletter focuses on resiliency, a necessary mental skill that can help you to cope with the obstacles sport and life throw at you.

So what is resiliency?
The best way to demonstrate the concept of resiliency is by using a rubber band. Take a rubber band and stretch it as far as you can. Now release the tension. After being stretched, it returns back to the form it started in, loose and ready to be stretched again. This is what resiliency is. It’s the ability to bounce back to where you started after your limits are tested or if you’ve been stressed in some way. In golf, they have a statistic to measure a player’s ability to be resilient. They call it the “bounce back.” Basically, they look at times when a golfer shoots over par on a hole and then how often he gets par or better on the next hole. Essentially, they are looking to see whether they let a bad hole affect the next one. A good example of this in swimming is if you add time in one event how often you are able to drop time in the next event. Ask yourself, “If I swim poorly in one race, do I let this carry over to the next one, or am I able to ‘bounce back’ and reset my mentality?”

How do I become more resilient?
I have a friend we call “Teflon,” because any problem he faces never seems to stick. Something bad can happen and he acts like it never affected him. Not everyone is so impervious to stress. Resiliency is a skill that can be learned. One way to become more resilient is to be realistic rather than making everything a reality-show-caliber drama. That is, a bad race is not the end of the world. You will live to race another day. Yes, you are disappointed, as any competitive person should be. You may not have qualified for a bigger meet, or maybe you feel like your hard work didn’t pay off. Regardless of how you feel at that moment, make sure those feelings are based in reality. All that happened is you didn’t do as well as you wanted in a swim meet.

Let’s assume, though, that the event was important and you can’t just brush it off as easily as you would like to. If this is the case, it’s helpful to have an established post-race routine that allows you to assess how things went and why you succeeded/or failed, and that allows you to put that race behind you and refocus on the next one. For example, after a race, regardless of the outcome you may want to make a habit of asking yourself three questions, 1) what did I do well?, 2) what can I improve on for next time?, and 3) what is my physical and mental plan for my next event? These questions allow you to realistically assess the last race and make sure you know your plan for your upcoming event.

Another way to recover from an unsuccessful performance is to examine how you attribute success and failure. Some people may swim a great time and attribute it to luck or win a race and believe it’s because they weren’t competing against anyone good. Make sure if you have success you know that you are the cause of this success and give yourself credit for working hard and swimming well. If you have a poor race and think there is never going to be anything you can do to get better, or lose and believe it was entirely your fault (rather than crediting competitors), it will be difficult for you to bounce back for the next event. It’s important to be optimistic and to understand that even though you may have “failed,” a new race is a clean slate. You have control over your own performance, and that there is always something you can do to improve.

Finally, to be resilient you need to be confident in yourself and your hard work. Believe that you are good and be optimistic that all of the hours you log in the pool will pay off.

Resilience is simply readjusting
Whether it’s after a poor performance, an injury, or any other obstacle from which you are trying to mentally or physically recover, remember that all it takes to be resilient is to readjust your mindset. You may have suffered a setback, but you have the ability to view this setback as a challenge that can make you stronger, more motivated and mentally tougher. Instead of telling yourself you failed or that you will never recover from the situation, simply remind yourself that you can take control over what happens in the future but can’t go back and change the past. Once the milk is spilled you can’t unspill it, but you do get to choose to either cry about the mess or grab a paper towel and clean it up.

Make it great!

Dr. Aimee

Dr. Aimee C. Kimball is the Director of Mental Training at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Sports Medicine. She received a PhD from the University of Tennessee where she specialized in sport psychology.

She is an Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology Certified Consultant, and is a member of the American Psychological Association, the United States Olympic Committee’s Sport Psychology Registry, the USA Swimming Sports Medicine Network, and the NCAA Speakers Bureau.

As a Mental Training Consultant, Dr. Kimball has worked with professional, collegiate, high school, recreational, and youth athletes in a variety of sports, and assists the Pittsburgh Steelers in analyzing potential draft picks.

She has been a featured speaker at conferences across the nation and has appeared in Men’s Health Magazine, Runner’s World, Athletic Management Magazine, various local and national newspapers, and has appeared on ESPN, NPR, and news broadcasts across the country.

She is a Clinical Faculty member in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Orthopaedics and an adjunct faulty member in the Sports Marketing Department at Duquesne University. Currently, Dr. Kimball works with athletes and other performers to assist them in achieving success in sport and life. For more information contact: 412-432-3777; kimballac@upmc.edu

USA Swimming – Psychology of Swimming

MENTAL TRAINING: SWIMMING FAST AND UNBURDENED FOR YOURSELF

BY DR. ALAN GOLDBERG, SPORT PSYCHOLOGIST

Let me ask you what may seem like a really silly question. How fast do you think you’d swim if you went into your best events with a 150-pound weight strapped to your back? Obvious answer: You’d be so weighed down that you wouldn’t be able to get off the blocks.  

Believe it or not, this is exactly what a lot of swimmers unknowingly do at many of their big meets. They consistently go into their races worried about disappointing mom and dad and/or their coach. When you do this mentally, it’s as if you are trying to swim while literally carrying mom, dad and/or coach on your back. While you might not be able to actually see this weight, the crushing burden of letting others down is powerful and performance disrupting.   

If you get up on the blocks and you’re preoccupied with wanting to make your parents and coach happy, and fearful that if you swim poorly, they won’t be, then you will inadvertently be creating the most powerful performance anxiety there is. Your nervousness will go into the red zone, your muscles will tighten and your arms and legs will feel like lead. No child ever wants to disappoint mom or dad. In fact, as kids, we’re hardwired to want to make our parents proud of us. When we fail, or have a less-than-stellar performance, it feels like we have directly disappointed those who matter to us. When this happens, we then worry they will love us less for it, and for a child, this is a scary and threatening situation. 

Most parents out there would be absolutely horrified to know that you as their son or daughter were worried about losing their love if you didn’t swim fast enough. These parents would want you to know that their love for you is totally unconditional, regardless of how fast you go in the pool. Loving parents would want you to know that they were proud of you just because of who you were and that you didn’t have to perform in any way to earn their love, caring or respect. Loving, appropriate parents would want you to enjoy swimming completely unburdened by their own expectations. They would want you to swim just for YOU, because YOU wanted to and YOU loved it.

This is why it is absolutely critical that you learn to swim for yourself. This means that when you approach practice and meets, you do it just for YOU! In other words, your goals and motivation should always come from inside of you and not be about making those around you happy. The goals that you pursue in this sport should be all yours, regardless of how grand or modest they might be.    

This also means that you learn to keep your pre-meet and pre-race focus of concentration on you and no one else. Worries about disappointing mom, dad or the coach means that you’re not keeping your concentration on you. When these kinds of “others” thoughts come up, you want to quickly return your focus to yourself and your swim. In addition, it’s critical that you learn to keep your focus in the moment, on what’s going on right now instead of allowing your concentration to jump ahead to the outcome and consequences of the race, (i.e. how people may be upset with you if you don’t go fast enough).

When you get up on those blocks you want to be totally unburdened by concerns with other’s expectations. You want to feel that you’re not swimming to prove your self-worth or lovability, but that you’re swimming from your heart, for the love of the sport. It’s only then that you’ll be able to consistently swim freely and fast.

USA Swimming - Speedo Tip of the Week Archives

If You Knew

Posted by Glenn Mills on Jan 11, 2008 09:03AM (2,683 views)

If you knew that the work you were doing today would reap rewards tomorrow... would you do it? If you knew that something you SHOULD do today COULD reap rewards in the future... would you do it?

Therein lies the problem with life. Nothing is guaranteed.

There is a direct relationship between work, and reward. For the most part, reward comes not from luck, not by chance, and not from knowing the right person or from being in the right place at the right time. In most cases, reward comes from being prepared for a situation when it's presented to you. Those key situations, the ones that offer a way to advance yourself, will be coming your way throughout your entire life, and in every PART of your life -- athletics, career, academics, and social. The question is always: Are you ready to answer the call when opportunity is offered?

As an athlete, you KNOW you have to attend practice to succeed. What's not so obvious is that WHAT you practice and how you EXECUTE the practice is what determines how WELL you succeed. Attendance does not equal success. Attendance with correct focus allows success. Attendance with desire allows success. Just because you show up at practice, and keep showing up a hundred times during a season or thousands of times over an athletic career, doesn't give you an automatic pass to success. Anyone can show up at practice and go back and forth. It's those who show up with a purpose who succeed. It's those who execute today's practice as if it's the ONLY gateway to their goals who will be closer to their ultimate goals.
Look at your everyday life. Look at your school work or career. If you KNEW that reading an extra 30 minutes a night would guarantee you better grades, would you do it? If you KNEW that studying those formulas an extra 15 minutes a day would assure you of passing next week's test, would you do it? If you KNEW that by understanding the needs of each potential customer would get you the sale, would you study your customers? If you KNEW that by streamlining TIGHTLY off every wall you'd travel faster while swimming LESS, thus improving your times with no additional effort, would you do it?

You wouldn't answer NO to any of those, would you? And, if you did, there are other websites for you to look at. ;)

Preparation is the key to EVERYTHING if you want to be successful. While it's easy to argue that people DO still win the lottery, I personally don't know anyone who has. I'm sure there is someone out there with a story of a lottery winner. I'm sure it's very exciting but, alas, it's not ME and it's probably not you if you're reading this. Most of us are destined to be on the work/reward track. But if you keep a positive attitude about this, you can take a lot of pride in the fact that you have created your own success in life.

To stay positive you need to embrace the challenge. The path is clear, but it's not easy. The hard-work path requires that you stay current on your work so that you can stay current on reaping your rewards. Success will come with more regularity when you prepare for it. Remember: When it comes to success, luck has NOTHING to do with it.

If You Knew - GoSwim!