Tag: Mental toughness

Tired? No One Cares When You are Competing

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Courtney Thompson, setter for the USA Women’s National Volleyball Team has written a blog post on the Positive Performance website talking about how she uses mental training to push through and overcome fatigue instead of getting frustrated and feeling bad for herself.

This post summarizes her discussion  to help athletes deal with fatigue so it doesn’t take them out of their game.

#1: It’s not about you, so get over it. 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! No one said success would be easy.

#3: Your mind is incredibly powerful. Use it to help 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. Find what works for you and use it. I want to go to bed at night knowing I did everything I could possibly do to help my team reach our mission.

#5: We won’t always feel 100% in a game. Train yourself to be ready for those days. The real competition in sports and in life is competing with yourself to bring your personal best, day in and day outfit is unrealistic to think we will perform feeling 100% all the time.

#6: Check that your behaviors are in line with your objectives. 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, The pursuit of becoming your best is hard work.

#7: Mood follows action. Start little, and keep going. 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.

#8: Remember: the pain of not going all out is much bigger than the pain of holding back. 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.

Improve Your Game This Summer – Try Grilling!

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With the summer season on the horizon it is time to focus on sports such as tennis, golf, beach volleyball, or summer platform tennis. Before we get into those sports we’ll digress briefly to talk a little “volleyball”.

Volleyball, Bicycle Riding, and Grilling

Last fall the USA women’s national volleyball team did what no other women’s team has done before. They won the World Championships with the coaching and practice philosophy, “the game teaches the game.”

John Kessel, Director of USA Volleyball Grassroots program, describes how the women’s team implemented this philosophy by talking about the process of learning to ride a bicycle.

Think about when you learned to ride a bike. You were put on the bike, given a push (and a prayer), and off you went.

  • Did you have private or group bicycle riding lessons?
  • Did your parents buy you special shoes, shorts, or other paraphernalia for riding your bicycle?
  • Did you go to bicycle riding camp for two weeks in the summer?
  • Did you do drills where you pedaled down the street with your left foot, then your right foot, then you alternated between feet on the way back?
  • Did you do play in a bicycle league?
  • Did you do team bonding exercises so you and your teammates could bicycle in a cooperative and friendly manner?
  • Did you have a bicycling nutritionist?
  • Did you have someone teach you about mental toughness when riding your bicycle to school?

NO! You got on the bike and you rode it. And when you fell, you got up, got back on the bike, you kept riding, and you got better.

The game teaches the game! The same holds true whether you are Women’s National Volleyball Team or local enthusiasts playing volleyball, riding your bike, playing golf, tennis beach volleyball, or summer platform tennis.

Grilling
Mixed doubles team doing two-on-one grills. Their goal is to improve their overhead to the corners.

The Essentials of Grilling

This brings us to the topic of summer grilling.

If John Kessel was your (fill in the sport) coach, he wouldn’t have you drill and he wouldn’t have you play games that often – you would GRILL.

Games + Drills = Grills.

Grilling is the process of incorporating technique, tactics, mental toughness, and even nutrition into match-like practice activities. Components of successful grilling are listed below:
• When there is relevant or game-like training, there will be a greater transfer of skills from practice to competitive situations.
• Numerous research studies have shown that athletes have greater retention when grilling is purposeful, and favors “random practice” as opposed to “blocked practice”.
• Effective grills allow all players to be involved in meaningful ways, i.e. there is no standing around. By setting different expectations for each player it is possible to include different abilities in many grills.
• Players can develop short positive cues that will serve as technical or tactical reminders. For example, backcourt players may use the cue “lobs go in” as a reminder to hit every lob in the court.
• Keeping score provides players with an incentive to play their hardest on every point.
• Good grills are easy to understand and explain. They should be given a name so they don’t have to be explained every time.
• Grills may be constructed so that players will be pushed out of their comfort zone. Failing in a grill should be viewed as an opportunity to improve.
• Develop grills that end with a natural conclusion, such as when a player hits a shot out of bounds.

There are hundreds of drills.  With a little creativity you can convert them to 12 to 15 grills to cover all aspects of your favorite sport. With a little ingenuity players can vary the scoring and rules for their grills to include everything from technique to mental toughness – all in a game-like situation.

Want to improve this summer – try grilling!

Grilling
Backcourt player lobbing the ball in 2-on-1 grill to improve her play out of the screens.

Rafa – A Guide to Mental Toughness

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The book, Rafa, written by John Carlin in 2011 takes a look at the mental toughness that has made Rafael Nadal the most dominant clay court player in the history of the sport. Specifically, it talks compares Nadal’s mindset in the finals of the 2007 and 2008 Wimbledon.

The following quotes from the book provide a sampling of Nadal’s mental state on the court.

  • Because what I battle hardest to do in a tennis match is to quiet the voices in my head, to shut everything out of my mind but the contest itself and concentrate every atom of my being on the point I am playing. If I made a mistake on a previous point, forget it; should’ve thought of victory suggest itself, crush it. 
  • I always dreamt of playing here at Wimbledon. My uncle Toni, who has been my coach all of my life, had drummed into me from an early age that this was the biggest tournament of them all. By the time I was 14, I was sharing with my friends the fantasy that I would play here one day and win. 
  • But my defeat in 2007 (in the Wimbledon finals), which went to five sets, left me utterly destroyed. I knew I could have done better, that it was not my ability or the quality of my game that had failed me, but my head. And I wept after that loss, I cried incessantly for half an hour in the dressing room.
  • Losing always hurts, but it hurts much more when you had your chance and threw it away. I have beaten myself as much as Federer had beaten me; I had let myself down and hated that. I had flagged mentally. I had allowed myself to get distracted; I had veered from my game plan. So stupid, so unnecessary. 
  • Tennis against a rival with whom you are evenly matched, or whom you have a chance of beating, this all about raising your game when it’s needed. A champion plays at his best not in the opening rounds of the tournament but in the semi-finals and the finals against the best opponents; the greatest champion plays at his best in a Grand Slam final.  
  • I also know that, most probably, the balance of poorly chosen or poorly struck shots would stand at close to fifty-fifty between us by the time it was all over. That is in the nature of tennis, especially with two players so familiar with each other’s game as Federer and I are. You might think that after the millions and millions of balls I’ve hit, I’d have the basic shots of tennis sown up, that reliability hitting a true, smooth, clean shot every time would be a piece of cake. But it isn’t. Not just because every day you wake up feeling differently, but because every shot is different; every single one. From the moment the ball is in motion, it comes at you at an infinitesimal number of angles and speeds; with more topspin, or backspin, or flatter, or higher. 
  • The differences might be minute, microscopic, but so are the variations your body makes – shoulders, elbow, wrists, hips, ankles, knees – in every shot. And there are so many other factors-the weather, the surface, the rival. No ball arrives the same way as another; no shot is identical. So every time you line up to hit a shot, you have to make a split-second judgment as to the trajectory and speed of the ball and then make a split second decision as to how, how hard, and where you must try and hit the shot back. And you have to do that over and over, often 50 times and a game, fifteen times in twenty seconds, in continual bursts more than two, three, four hours and all the time you’re running hard and your nerves are taut; it’s when your coordination is right and the tempo is smooth that the good sensations come, that you were better able to manage the biological and mental feat of striking the ball clearly in the middle of the racquet and aiming it true, at speed and under immense mental pressure, time after time. And one thing I have no doubt; the more you train, the better you’re feeling. Tennis is, more than most sports, a sport of the mind; it is the player who has those good sensations on the most days, who manages to isolate himself best from his fears and from the ups and downs in morale a match inevitably brings, who ends up being world number one.

The book has much more and is a must read for any athlete wanting to improve his or her mental toughness.