8 REASONS NO ONE CARES YOU’RE TIRED: FIGHTING FATIGUE IN ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE

By Courtney Thompson of www.positiveperformancetraining.com

Most of us respond to fatigue by getting frustrated and feeling bad for ourselves. We let our fatigue take us out of our game and into a mindset that isn’t helpful to us or our team.

Luckily, I have a few tips you can use to help get out of that destructive thought pattern and back to focusing on becoming the best athlete you can be. It may sound harsh, but here are

8 REASONS NO ONE CARES YOU’RE TIRED

#1: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, SO GET OVER IT.

The fact of the matter is you play a team game, even if it’s an individual sport, and as a teammate one of your jobs is to serve your team, to do whatever it takes to make the team better. Doing so requires selflessness and a commitment every single day you show up.

If you’re tired, if you’re sore, if you’re sick, you have to choose to not let that stop you and move past it. In that moment, it doesn’t matter how you ‘feel’ because it’s not about you; it’s about making the team the best it can be. In order to do that you have to show up every day with the intention of giving it everything you have.

Put the team ahead of your ‘feelings’ and get it done!

#2: ALL CHAMPIONS EXPERIENCE FATIGUE WHEN PUSHING THEIR LIMITS. SO FEEL IT AND EMBRACE IT… FATIGUE MEANS YOU’RE ON YOUR WAY!

As athletes, we’re in a perpetual state of becoming. There is no finish line; even if you win the championship one year, your training for the next year will quickly follow. The only way to truly improve, learn, and take your game to the next level is to push the limits.

Pushing the limits can be physically, mentally, and/or emotionally tough, but that’s the beauty of sports! Pushing those limits on a daily basis is necessary to become the best version of you. It’s inevitable that in pursuit of your best YOU, you’re going to get tired, so change your attitude towards fatigue. When you feel tired and want to stay in bed—or just want to get through practice without giving it your all—remember that this is what you work for, this is what all champions feel when they’re trying to reach their full potential.

In short: embrace your fatigue. No one said success would be easy.

Embrace your fatigue. No one said success would be easy. @courtLthompson

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#3: YOUR MIND IS INCREDIBLY POWERFUL. USE IT TO HELP YOU!

You train the brain to perform just like you train your muscles. We’ve all had days where you feel more tired than usual and in that moment you have a choice: you can marinate in those negative thoughts (‘It’s too hard’, ‘There’s no way I can do this’, ‘I didn’t sleep at all’, ‘I’m not feeling my best’, et cetera) OR you can take a long, deep breath, reconnect with yourself, and start thinking right. You can choose to put your energy and your thoughts on something that will help you rather than something that will distract you.
You’re an athlete. Being tired is a part of that, so accept it and move on.  Choose to think about what you need to do to help the team in that moment.

#4: YOUR MISSION DOESN’T CARE IF YOU’RE TIRED.

The mission of your team doesn’t hear anyone say they’re tired… and it doesn’t go away. Either you move towards it or away from it with each day you train. So, when it gets hard, remember the mission and find inspiration wherever you can. For some people, this is accomplished through visualizing winning a championship every morning, or by listening to their favorite pump up song, or by watching video of their favorite teams competing.

Find what works for you and use it. (For me, I try to ‘empty the tank’ every day I compete. I want to go to bed at night knowing I did everything I could possibly do to help my team reach our mission.)

Again, it’s not always easy (and it shouldn’t be), so on days when it’s hard to remember the end goal, take a few minutes to visualize that goal—see, taste, smell, hear, and feel what it would feel like to reach it. Then, get to work! Find inspiration wherever you can and do everything in your power to become your best until the mission is accomplished.

#5: WE WON’T ALWAYS FEEL 100% IN A GAME. TRAIN YOURSELF TO BE READY FOR THOSE DAYS.

It’s unrealistic to think that we’re going to feel awesome all the time. You might have a cold; you might have stayed up all night studying for finals; you might have had to get up early to finish reading that book for class. Whatever ‘it’ is, we’ve all been there!

The real competition in sports and in life is competing with yourself to bring your personal best, day in and day out. It is unrealistic to think we will perform feeling 100% all the time. On the days you’re feeling like you’re operating at about 80%,  you still need to compete to bring your best on that day. That’s all we can do.

If you spend time worrying about the fact that you’re not at 100%, those thoughts are just distracting you from maximizing what you do have, your 80%.

Therefore, work hard to bring YOUR BEST every single day. Try not to judge where that is, but rather keep fighting the good fight by working to bring your best one play at a time.

#6: CHECK THAT YOUR BEHAVIORS ARE IN LINE WITH YOUR OBJECTIVES.

The pursuit of becoming your best is hard. Again, no one said it would be easy. People often look at an athlete who wins a championship and think that getting there must have all been fun, happy, and maybe even comfortable. Get that out of your head. It’s not.

Trying to reach your full potential takes grit, determination, commitment, perspective, and resilience.  It may be easy to say that you want to be the best when everything is going well, but the real question is will your behavior be in line with those goals when it gets hard?

It’s hard when it’s 6AM and you have to get up for weight training, or when it’s a Friday afternoon and you’d rather leave practice early than to get extra reps in on the skill you’ve been struggling with. It’s difficult when it’s already been a long day, but now you need to have a tough conversation with a teammate. Those are the real choices we have and make that determine how good we will become.

Don’t take the easy road. If you want to do something rare, you’re going to have to make choices that most people aren’t willing to make. That’s why winning feels so good when we’ve done it the right way.

Next time you’re tired and trying to decide what to do, ask yourself, “Are my behaviors in line with my objectives?”

#7: MOOD FOLLOWS ACTION. START LITTLE, AND KEEP GOING.

We’re human. Some days we just wake up tired, annoyed, and distracted. Still, you don’t have to be subject to your mood every morning.

From the start of a rough day, act in line with your goals—make just one small step—and you’ll gather momentum and come to realize you’re actually in control of your mood and your day. Then take one more small step, then another, and another. At some point your ‘mood’ will change as you involve yourself in each step, each task. You’ll realize that being productive and working to help yourself is a fun and rewarding process.

#8: REMEMBER: THE PAIN OF NOT GOING ALL OUT IS MUCH BIGGER THAN THE PAIN OF HOLDING BACK.

Teddy Roosevelt once said,

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Being a member of a team composed of people committed to becoming their best, and hopefully doing something special in the process, is an incredible thing. I’m fortunate to have been on teams that have won several championships; in high school, in the NCAA, and recently at the World Championships with Team USA. I’ve also lost my share of big games at every level. What I’ve learned is that at some point the high of winning and the sting of losing will wear off, and the real joy comes from knowing you exhausted every possibility to help your team reach its goals and whether or not you and your team were good teammates along the way.

Did you overcome failures together and push each other to work hard when it wasn’t easy? Did you enjoy the successes but continue to push each other to reach new limits?

These are the things that bring true satisfaction and fatigue is only one challenge of many along this road to success.

When fatigue pops up help each other through it because, in the end, it’s in overcoming the challenges that ultimately leads you to becoming the best you can be.

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Athletes: how do you fight fatigue? Share your secrets with us in the comments.

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COURTNEY THOMPSON

Courtney comes to Positive Performance as a widely successful collegiate and Olympic Volleyball player. While continuing to pursue her professional career, Courtney joins us to pursue her other passion; teaching life skills through sport. As a Mental Training Coach, Courtney brings extensive real world knowledge of the pressures and challenges of playing at the highest competitive level in the world.Courtney has also been featured in the documentary 'Court & Spark' (http://psrvb.org/documentary).

The Truth About Positive Self-Talk

By Lindsey Wilson of www.positiveperformancetraining.com  

There’s a lot out there about positivity and the importance of having a positive mindset: talking to yourself positively, talking to your kids positively, even talking to your pets positively. (Groan… Yes, it’s a thing!)

All this positivity can be a bit much.

And that’s saying a lot, especially coming from someone like me who’s a BIG believer in the power of the glass-is-half-full mentality. The complication with positivity is that it can be hard to distinguish what is actually helpful and what is just, well, fluff.

That’s why I want to talk specifically about self-talk today because, in my opinion, self-talk serves as the basis for so many things in our lives: our beliefs, our outlook, our confidence, how we interact with others, and much, much more. But, I don’t just want to talk about self-talk alone; I also want to dive into the research behind it to make sure this isn’t just another ‘positive self-talk is great’ article. Yay!

Seeing as our focus is athletics, I want to specifically analyze the research looking into the relationship between self-talk and performance. Basically, my big question is:

Is teaching athletes positive self-talk worth it?

So, here we go! This is what I found:

• Positive self-talk does positively affect performance.
• Self-talk effects motor skill performance more than cognitive performance.
• Self-talk is best scripted ahead of time and practiced.
• Research shows there are differences in what type of statements you should say at different times, but…
• What works for each person is fundamentally a matter of personal preference.
• Addressing yourself by name or ‘you’ is found to be more powerful than ‘I’ statements.
• Self-talk should focus on what you should do rather than what you should not do.

First, before we can talk about self-talk in depth, we need to establish a solid definition. More specifically, we need to be able to answer the following questions:

1. What IS self-talk?
2. What different types of self-talk are there?
3. Are there types that are more helpful in certain situations than others?

These questions get really specific, really fast, so let’s start with a basic overview of self-talk and go from there.

DEFINING SELF-TALK

The Mayo Clinic defines self-talk as “the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head… [that] can be positive or negative.” Furthermore, “[i]f your thoughts are mostly positive, you’re likely an optimist — someone who practices positive thinking.”

Positive thinking, therefore, is the result of positive self-talk, and those can offer multiple health benefits, such as increased life span and increased immunity.

The Mayo Clinic then gives us examples of both positive and negative self-talk:

Putting positive thinking into practice

NEGATIVE SELF TALK	POSITIVE SELF TALK
I’ve never don’t it before.	It’s an opportunity to learn something new.
It’s too complicated.	I’ll tackle it from a different angle.
I don’t have the resources.	Necessity is the mother of invention.
I’m too lazy to get this done.	I wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule, but I can re-examine some priorities.
There’s not way it will work.	I can try to make it work.
It’s too radical a change.	Let’s take a chance.
No one bothers to communicate with me.	I’ll see if I can open the channels of communication.
I’m not going to get any better at this.	I’ll give it another try.

The Mayo’s cover-all rule: “Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to anyone else.”

Simple enough right? Not so fast. Let’s dive into this a little deeper…

TYPES OF SELF-TALK

Research shows there are 4 specific categories of performance-based self-talk:

• Calming/relaxing (“Take a deep breath.”)
• Instructional (“Bend your knees.”)
• Motivational (“Yes! Come on, let’s go!”)
• Focus (“Don’t think about anything. Just concentrate.”)

This list got me paying attention. Why? Because these categories are all so different. Even for myself, I can see one type of statement working in a certain situation and not working in another. (Leaving the research aside for a moment, this is where I encourage athletes to build up self-awareness and to practice what works with some trial and error.)

But, back to the research…

WHAT TO SAY, WHEN

In Perspectives on Psychological Science[i], a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Thessaly did a meta-analysis on 62 research studies on self-talk. Their analysis revealed that, not only did self-talk improve sports performance, but different self-talk cues work differently in certain situations.

Here is what they found:

• Instructional self-talk (i.e. “Elbow-up”) is most helpful for tasks requiring fine skills or for improving technique.
• Motivational self-talk (i.e. “Give it your all”) seems to be more effective in tasks requiring strength or endurance, boosting confidence and psyching-up athletes for competition.

It is a matter of personal preference or what works for each person; but generally, it is advised that self-talk is positively rather than negatively phrased and focuses on what you should do rather than on what you should avoid…”

Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis, researcher at the University of Thessaly

A SMALL TRICK

According to an article in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology[ii], a researcher by the name of Kross and his associates at the University of Michigan did an experiment with one small caveat: participants would either use the word ‘I’ or ‘You/[their name]’ when addressing themselves with their self-talk.

This is what the experiment looked like:

Kross asked volunteers to give a speech. Catch: they were only given five minutes of mental preparation. During the five minutes, he told some to talk to themselves and to address themselves as ‘I’. For the rest of them, their five minutes was spent using ‘you’ or  by addressing themselves in the third person (using their own names).

At the close of the study, this is what Kross found:

• People who used ‘I’ said things like ‘Oh, my god, how am I going do this? I can’t prepare a speech in five minutes without notes. It takes days for me to prepare a speech!’
• People who used ‘you’ or their own names said things like, “Ethan, you can do this. You’ve given a ton of speeches before.”

Clearly, the people who used ‘you’ or their names sounded more rational and less emotional—perhaps because they were able to get some distance from themselves.

Truly, it sounds like they are coaching themselves.

SELF-TALK CAN INFLUENCE RESULTS!

Research done out of Waseda University in Japan[iii] shows again that motor skills especially are greatly affected by self-talk. The results of their research show that positive self-talk improved physical performance by 11%.

Their research was based around a simple balancing exercise. Students completed the exercise then were given 30 seconds to rest before completing it a second time. In between the sets, students were told to pay attention to their self-talk. Some students reported having negative self talk; others reported positive self-talk; still another group reported using a combination of positive and negative self-talk.

The results were shocking.

Students that reported using positive self-talk exclusively during those 30 seconds were able to hold their balance a full second longer than those who used exclusively negative or had a mix of both negative and positive self-talk.

The positive self-talk resulted in an average balance time of 9.29 seconds, while the other two groups averaged out at 8.29 seconds. This is more than an 11% increase in performance, really close to the proven 15% increase in athletic performance we see with Positive Performance’s mental training.

CONCLUSION

Based on the above findings it’s obvious that teaching athletes how and when to use positive self-talk—that is, using positive self-talk appropriately—is not only a good time investment, but a worthwhile one.

I’m harnessing the power of Positive Self-Talk with @PositivePerform. Are you?

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While talking about positive self-talk can seem merely warm and fuzzy, research shows that it is a powerful, actionable tool in achieving one’s peak performance. And, based on our own work with athletes, here are some simple best practices for self-talk education:

6 TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POSITIVE SELF-TALK

1. Self-talk should be practiced ahead of time (outside of competition).
2. While there are best practices, the focus should be less about negative/positive, or good/bad self-talk, and more about what is PRODUCTIVE for athletes in certain situations.
3. Individual preferences are okay.
4. Self-talk should be focused on what should be done, rather than what should be avoided.
5. Different situations might call for different types of self-talk.
6. It is difficult to turn off self-talk. For most people, self-talk is going to happen, for the good or the bad, regardless of whether you work on it. Knowing that, you may as well make the monologue in your head helpful… and positive!

Here’s to athletes everywhere, using self-talk as a tool to find their peak performance every time they step onto the playing field.

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REFERENCES:

[i] Girodo & Wood, 1979; Goodhart, 1986; Mahoney & Avener, 1977; Van Raalte et al., 1994; Weinberg, 1985

[ii] Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

[iii] Belief in Self-Talk and Dynamic Balance Performance.Kaori Araki (Waseda University, Japan), Joseph K. Mintah (Azusa Pacific University), Mick G. Mack, Sharon Huddleston, Laura Larson, and Kelly Jacobs  (University of Northern Iowa).

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 LINDSEY WILSON

Co-Founder of Positive Performance, Lindsey has been teaching, writing and speaking about mental training for the last 6 years. Lindsey writes regularly on mental training. Her articles have appeared in ESPN’s HoopGurlz.com, AVCA, NSCAA, NYTimes.com, VISIONS magazine, FullCourtPress. com. Contact her at lindsey@positiveperform.com