What Meditation & Mindfulness Have To Do With Mental Toughness

by Dr. Alan Goldberg – www.competitivedge.com

There is a tendency in the world of sports to be “tough” and put on a brave face no matter what, to push yourself through obstacles with force, and to keep yourself moving because the alternative of slowing down might mean that you’re “falling behind.” But the problem with that full-speed-ahead approach is that it’s bound to burn you out in the long run, and it’s not going to help you mature as an athlete.

Real Mental Toughness requires slowing down both physically and mentally.

Many of the techniques I teach, such as controlling your eyes and ears, staying focused in the NOW, and emphasizing the process over the outcome are a unique way of applying the concept of mindfulness to sports. But if you really want to grow as an athlete it’s helpful to understand the broader definition of mindfulness and apply it to life both on and off the field so that you can benefit in multiple ways.

So what is mindfulness?

If you’ve ever time-travelled in your head and got distracted with thoughts while your body was doing something on autopilot then that’s a good example of what mindfulness is NOT, and what it aims to address. When “the lights are on but nobody’s home” so to speak, you are not doing whatever it is you’re doing to your full capacity.

If you’re in practice and thinking about how you really need to win the next game, how embarrassed you are about some mistake you made in the past, or how you’re failing chemistry then your concentration will suffer because your body and mind are in two separate places. Mindfulness helps bring the two back together so that you have more focus, clarity, and are able to perform better.

It’s a concept rooted in the Buddhist tradition that basically asks that you bring more conscious attention to what you’re doing in that moment. Whether you’re brushing your teeth, having a laugh with family, or stretching pre-performance, being mindful means keeping your thoughts only in that action rather than allowing them to wander elsewhere.

Let’s take the example of stretching. Doing it mindfully means fully feeling your body with a quiet mind. If it helps you can “think” about how a certain muscle group feels when you’re stretching it, imagine tense areas relaxing, and really appreciating how your body allows you to engage in a sport you love. That’s it. If you start to think about other things then just bring your attention back to the stretch, no need to self-criticize for those wandering thoughts, just bring your attention back and continue with the mindful action. Try mindfulness when you do other things too, like walking, eating, playing with your dog, etc.

The more you get in the habit of doing all sorts of things mindfully the easier it will be for you to access the concentration necessary to reach peak performance when it’s crunch time!

Now here’s another practice that will improve your performance: meditation.

Stay with me here, this isn’t woo-woo stuff, I’m not asking you to dance in the forest and go on a shamanic journey. Meditation is a scientifically proven effective strategy that helps increase mental functions, lower stress, and even improve resilience to adversity. And if I’m not enough to convince you then consider this: some of the most successful athletes like Kobe Bryant, Joe Nameth, Arthur Ashe, Barry Zito, Lebron James, Derek Jeter, and many others meditate. It worked out pretty well for them so you might as well give it a try!

Meditation is both incredibly simple and very difficult at first. Here’s what you do: sit and do nothing!

You can start with 5 or 10 minutes every day, and choose a time of day where you can do it consistently. Mornings tend to be best but you should prioritize consistency, so if you’re not a morning person then try afternoons or evenings. Sit down on a cushion on the floor or in a chair, close your eyes, and just focus on your breathing. That's all, just focus on your breathing. Without altering your breath in any way, feel the breath come in and then the breath go out. If there's a pause between breaths, notice the pause. As thoughts come in, label them, "thinking," and immediately bring your focus back to your inhale and your exhale.  Use a timer so you don't have to keep checking the clock.

Mental Toughness is all about training your mind and these techniques will go a long way in helping you reach a new level of performance.

A Personalized Way for Swimmers to Increase Mental Toughness

by Olivier Poirier-Leroy

If you want to be mentally tougher, start out by defining what mental toughness is for you. Here’s how.

Mental toughness.

You hear it so often from coaches, swimmers, announcers, and amateurish swim bloggers (hey, that’s me!) that you almost become tone-deaf to its importance.

Kind of like how you become nose-blind to the smell of chlorine after a while. (Could also be that the chlorine is slowly deadening your smelling apparatus. But let’s move on from that thought for now.)

You know that mental toughness is important. You know that you could benefit from more of it. You know that it will probably even help you be a little bit taller. You could be a baller. Have a girl who would look good, you could call her.

But because mental toughness is such a vague concept, and so head-scratchingly difficult to measure, you don’t even know where you would begin.

It’s like saying, “Let’s be better!”

Cool—no one is arguing that “being better” is a good idea. I want to be better. You want to be better. But what does that actually mean? And who is going to decide when we hit that point that we are “being better”? How do we know with any kind of certainty that we’ve reached a point that we are “better”?

One of the problems with increasing mental toughness is that it’s hard to measure.

It’s a moving target unless we are able to affix some sort of quantifiable variable to it. It’s not something you can look at with complete, quantifiable certainty and say, “Your mental toughness is presently at a 6.34 out of 10, sir! Let’s get that up to a soft 8 or at least a hard 7, okay there, broski?”

It’s not like a stroke rate. Or an interval. Or the amount of meters you did last week. It’s a completely subjective rating.

Compounding things further is that mental toughness is a sliding scale; what may be mentally tough for one swimmer is easey peasey for another.

While you may think swimming a 5k straight descending the 1000s is another day at the office, for someone else that represents a task of Herculean and wildly un-interesting proportions.

See Also: Hey Coach: Should I Track My Workouts?

With no template or universal scale for assessing mental toughness, where do we even begin on trying to figure out how to increase and strengthen it? Especially as we know that resilience, grit, fortitude—whatever we are calling it this week—is one of the determining characteristics of successful individuals in the water?

Here’s a way that you can figure out what mental toughness means for you…and what you can do to in order to toughen up your brain so that it’s leathery like your grandpa’s catcher’s mitt.

Where do you fall apart mentally?

I will freely admit right off the red top that this exercise is going to be a little humbling—no one likes to have to admit that they aren’t as awesome as they tell themselves they are. But self-awareness is  the jefe when it comes to improvement.

If it’s hyper-improvement you want—and yes, you want it—than let’s get down on some self-honesty.

Be real with yourself, man.

The point of this exercise isn’t to make you feel crappy about yourself. It’s to give you a trampoline from which to bound off of like LeBron James with two hundred Pogo sticks taped to his ankles into being a better, tougher swimmer.

See Also: The Research Behind the Mindset of Super Champions

After all, the goal isn’t necessarily mental toughness for the sake of being mentally tough. We are simply using MT as a tool to get more from ourselves in training and competition so that we can make the most of our abilities. In other words, crush the competition and destroy our best times. There, I said it.

Let’s get down on it.

What are the top 3 things that I struggle with the most mentally in practice?

In other words, what are the circumstances where my performance sinks to the bottom of the pool faster than a weight belt?

Do I give up prematurely on the main sets? Does my self-talk stink when things aren’t going my way? Do I find myself resisting stroke and technique corrections? Am I making excuses for myself before I even get in the water before a hard workout?

Seriously. List the top moments where things unravel for you in practice. These are going to be your opportunities to overcome and prove to yourself that you ain’t no chlorinated scaredy cat.

The more specific the better.

• If you find yourself failing on the 9^th rep of a particular set, write that down.
• If you are having a hard time staying focused for longer than 1000m of a long, unbroken set (my favorite kind of set recently, as it were), write down exactly when things fall apart.

The more specific and the more measurable, the clearer your attempts at being mentally tougher will become.

You will have tangible, objective things to work on, instead of hoping and wishing that today will be the day you are suddenly infused with a high octane shot of mental fortitude.

Attack, attack, attack.

Figuring out where things unravel for you is the first step.

The next?

Habituating yourself by placing yourself in those situations so that you give yourself a chance to overcome them and develop some free-range, wholly legitimate mental toughness (with a steaming side of self-confidence).

• When I feel like giving up on the main set…I will attack the next two reps with everything I have.
• When my self-talk starts to go all negative nelly on me…I will tell myself that I am tougher than I give myself credit for.

Write down the situation in practice that will recreate the moments where things fall apart for you mentally.

Defining and confronting these moments head-on will give you that toughness and confidence that you can overcome difficult stuff, while also supercharging your efforts in the water, giving you better results, faster.

More Stuff Like This:

3 Ways to Stay Focused and Calm Behind the Blocks. The way we experience anxiety and how focused we are behind the blocks has real effects on our performance in the water. Here’s three things you can do to stay focused and control your anxiety levels.

6 Benefits of Mental Training for Swimmers. Not sold on the benefits of improving your mindset? Here are just some of the reasons to give it a look.

The Power of Journaling for Swimmers. Want better workouts? A bullet-proof race plan? Less anxiety behind the blocks? Yup—the simple act of journaling can help. Big time. Here’s how.

THE PRE-PERFORMANCE STRATEGY TO HELP YOU FOCUS AND SUCCEED

By Dr. Alan Goldberg

Athletes and coaches often ask me how they can get in or stay in “the zone” of a great performance, and the answer to that is usually simpler than they expect: you have to stay in the NOW of what’s happening.

The thing that causes athletes to lose their focus is usually time-traveling to the past or the future, wasting their precious mental energy on thinking about the mistakes they made in the last game, or how important this performance is to their ultimate goals. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to analyze and learn from the past, and to have ambitious goals, but you should NOT be doing this RIGHT BEFORE OR DURING A PERFORMANCE!

All that mental chatter is only going to distract you or put unnecessary pressure on you, leading you to lose your concentration and not perform to your potential. In those crucial moments right before a game, event, performance, race, and even practice, the best thing you can do is LEARN TO CONTROL YOUR EYES AND EARS.

What do I mean by that?

Controlling your eyes and ears pre-performance means that before competition starts you look and listen to ONLY the things that will keep you calm, loose, and confident.

If talking to friends before the event helps keep you centered then continue doing this, but if it distracts you and gives you a shaky start then DON’T! If looking into the stands or at your opponents makes you uptight and nervous, then don’t do that either. Instead, find somewhere else to deliberately focus your eyes, such as by reading a book before or between events, watching your legs as you stretch, picking out one spot and staring at it while breathing and tuning out whatever is happening around you, or focusing on your glove, shoes, or some favorite thing that you like to have with you.

These visual targets or focal points will distract you from the REAL distractions!

A coach I know even advises her athletes to walk around the arena before the game and pick out a few focal points in advance, so that when the heat is on and distractions are plenty they can go right to those points and easily avoid the other distractions.

By picking specific targets to look at ahead of time and regularly using them, you’ll have a much easier time successfully staying calm and confident when it counts.

When it comes to your ears, there are two sources of possible distraction: outside sources and inner self-talk. SPEND AS LITTLE TIME AS POSSIBLE LISTENING TO THINGS THAT DRAIN YOUR CONFIDENCE. Instead, substitute positive or neutral sounds that will distract you from the negatives.

If hearing the crowd distracts you or makes you feel pressure then put on some headphones and listen to music that makes you feel at ease, or something motivating and helpful like mental toughness training. If there are opponents or even teammates who are negative or intimidating you then do your best to get as far from them as possible.

Same goes for negative self-talk, if your mind is coming up with negative messages like “you’re not ready to play at this level” or “don’t screw up like last time” then rather than engaging those thoughts or negotiating with yourself to stop thinking them, focus your ears on something else. You can either replace those thoughts with more positive process-orientedaffirmations such as “I am going to stay focused and perform at my very best” or “this is going to be a great game and I’m just going to have fun” or think of a word or phrase that boosts your confidence (such as “confidence”) and repeat that over and over in your head. 

Controlling your eyes and ears is a strategy you can also apply during any breaks within the performance itself, so that you don’t lose your concentration and momentum during half-time or while you’re waiting for your turn to perform.

Give it a try and see what works best for you. YOUR focal points might be different from another athlete so try a few different ones and see which results in the most effective means of keeping your concentration and performance optimal.