Mental Edge

December 2010 - Injury and Fear

“It is a rough road that leads to greatness.”
- Seneca

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not the absence of fear.”
- Mark Twain

Following the Greek’s victory over the Persian’s at the battle of Marathon, Pheidippides ran from the battle site all the way to Athens to announce the victory. As he delivered this news, he collapsed and died. His effort is emulated in today’s marathon, and his behavior reflects the importance placed on intensity, determination, and sacrifice in sport. The idea of athleticism as heroism is woven into the very fabric of sport and dates to the dawn of competitive sport. In modern sport, the athlete that is able or willing to play with or through pain is the athlete that is seen as “mentally tough.” The expectation for high performance and maximal effort permeates the world of sport. In high visibility sports, the fans and media join the coach and athlete in evaluating performance by these standards. As a consequence, the athlete is implicitly encouraged to take risks that potentially impact both physical and mental well-being.

Those devoted to the pursuit of excellence will inevitably judge performance by a standard more lofty and stringent than that reflected in normative behavior. A distinctive element of sport is the tremendous importance of what day-to-day life might amount to trivial differences in time and distance. The motto “citius, altius, fortius” (faster, higher, stronger) emphasizes this. Exquisite physical and mental prowess is the hallmark of sport performance, and even slight decrements in physical and mental skills affect performance. In short, variations in psychological and physical functioning that are “within normal limits” for daily behavior may be of critical significance in the highly demanding arena of sport. Even subtle or transient disruptions in the mental and emotional state may impact physical performance. These can be precipitated by a number of factors including pain, fear of injury, and dysphoria. The common factor with all of these is confidence.

It would seem that to maintain confidence is to have self-efficacy in the exercise of thought control (Bandura, 1997). Athletes need to be able to block out distractions, control disruptive negative thinking, and develop the efficacy to cope with failure because failure is a natural part of competition. Much of the distress athletes experience over failure is usually self-inflicted when they dwell on failures instead of savoring successes. The cognitive control task is for athletes to stop thinking about mistakes and failures and to rid themselves of disruptive thinking by concentrating their attention on the task at hand and generating helpful thinking. In short, Bandura (1997) would say that mastery over threats and stressors is vital to athletic functioning. There are 2 traditional ways to do this: pre and post-performance routines. Pre-performance routines are characteristic sequences of thoughts and actions that athletes adhere to prior to skill execution. Post-performance routines are action sequences that may help athletes leave their errors behind so that they can refocus on the task at hand.

Let’s say, for example, you’re a WCCFer and that during a WOD, you wiped out on a 24 inch box hop injuring yourself. You rest and recover as need be and come back to your first WOD post-injury and you see it…24” Box Hops! Your heart sinks. Your stomach is in knots. You are filled with thoughts swirling around your confidence with the box hop. You warm-up as necessary and head into the recorded workout. Pulling out your 24” box you approach it. Set yourself, and as you dip into a powerful position the thought, “you’ll never make it,” along with the image of your previous wipeout rush through your mind. You walk over to the wall and grab a 20” box feeling poorly about your effort and foolish about your thoughts. Now what? Are you stuck not being able to do another RX workout that calls for the 24” box? How do you overcome these thoughts? How can you muster confidence in the face of fear?

Zen meditation practice would teach to synchronize mind and body. People are taught that if any random thought or feeling arises in their mind, they should just let it come and go as it does and not try to stop it, get rid of it, or analyze or judge it. Thoughts are just thinking. They are viewed as indicators of a loss of awareness, and signal the need to regain awareness. So rather than trying to stop the thought, change the thought, counter the thought, and reframe the thought, athletes simply identify it as a break in concentration, and refocus. The ultimate goal is “action with awareness,” and the qualities that accompany this experience include expansive vision, effortless focus, feelings of equanimity and timelessness, abundant confidence, and complete freedom of doubt or anxiety (Parent, 2002). . In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, the warrior’s confidence was described as,

Confidence does not mean that you have confidence in something, but it is remaining in the state of confidence, free from competition or one-upmanship. It is an unconditional state in which you possess an unwavering state of mind that needs no reference point. There is no room for doubt; even the question of doubt does not occur. This kind of confidence contains gentleness, because the notion of fear does not arise; sturdiness, because in the state of confidence there is ever-present resourcefulness; and joy, because trusting in the heart brings a greater sense of humor. This confidence can manifest as majesty, elegance, and richness in a person’s life.

Ruminations are more effectively eradicated by personal enablement than trying to combat unwanted thought with competing thought. Central to thought control is the importance for athletes to remember that they are in control. Athletes can choose whether or not to act, think, and be confident. If an athlete’s confidence goes away before or during competition, it is not because the opponent took it away. Rather, the athlete gave this confidence away when he or she stopped believing in themselves. One of the keys to maintaining confidence is for athletes to develop the ability to discipline themselves so that they are always thinking in ways that give them the best opportunity to perform well and achieve their goals.

November 2010 - Arousal-Performance Relationship

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You must know for which harbor you are headed if you are to catch the right wind to take you there.”
Seneca

Most athletes at some point in time have experienced an unexpected breakdown in their performance. Consider the following examples: A US Olympic weightlifter in international competition surprisingly deviates from his customary preparatory routine before a clean and jerk and forgets to chalk his hands and the lift is missed; A gymnast prepares for a high flyaway dismount from the rings suddenly focuses on self-doubts concerning his ability to perform the stunt without the presence of a spotter; These doubts, coupled with a long routine and fatigue cause him to freeze and miss the dismount; Finally, a sprinter who appears lackadaisical and lethargic during precompetition warm-up records one of her worst 100 m times.

Competition can generate much anxiety and worry, which in turn can affect physiological and thought processes so dramatically that performance often deteriorates. These concerns are generally related to the topic of motivation and arousal. The energy produced by increases in arousal can be likened to the engine of an automobile which, when the car is in neutral can be varied along a continuum (i.e. revolutions per minute- rpms) without affecting direction (i.e. forward or reverse). Arousal is a nondirectional term that has no more positive or negative connotation than the rpms. However, when the car is in motion and the speed is too fast for conditions, the wrong energy levels of a car can disrupt the efficient driving performance and cause it to crash. Ideal rpms should match the requirements for the desired outcome to produce the greatest performance. This unnatural state is what we would refer to as performance dysregulation- in which extraneous influences interfere with the natural coordination action of the skill being performed. Without the proper arousal, athletes may be left simply spinning their wheels.

Optimal arousal level will depend on task characteristics as well as individual difference factors. First, you must increase your awareness. In order to do this for yourself, pick a specific task from your sport and break down the aspects of it into 3 primary components: Decisions of Characteristics of Skill, Perception of Characteristics of Skill, and Motor Act of Characteristics of Skill (Williams, 2008). Each of these components will allow you to better define where your arousal level should be at its lowest, middle and peak depending on the task at hand. For example, Grace will take a different level of arousal than Murph than Fight Gone Bad. Each WOD, devastating in their own right, pulls for a different arousal set during the workout. Within each your activation level, may need to be consistently high, ebb and flow, or crescendo and maintain, then return to nil only to be asked to be peaking again, with each WOD respectively. By increasing your understanding of arousal-performance relationships, you will be able to better assess the task demands and more accurately determine arousal levels for your sport. In short, it’s not always best to go out as hard as you can. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race…or WOD in our case.

October 2010 - The Way of Transition

The Way of Transition

“Everybody wants to be somebody. Nobody wants to grow.”
- Goethe

“The important thing is this: To sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
- Charles DuBos

It’s a paradox: To achieve continuity, we have to be willing to change. Change is the only way to protect whatever exists. Without continuous readjustment the present cannot continue. The refusal to change will not guarantee that whatever we care about stays the same. It only assures us whatever we care about has been deprived of the very thing it needs in order to survive. The very things that we wish we could hold onto and keep safe from change are themselves originally produced by changes. Many of those changes, looked just as daunting as any in the present do. Change is not only the path ahead, but the path behind us, the one that we traveled along wherever we are now trying to stay. However, in my experience of working with people to change, I can tell you it is not the change that people resist, it is the transition. These two words seem synonymous; but, in fact, they are very different. Change is a situation shift.

Transition is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way things subsequently become (Bridges, 2001). Between the letting go and the taking hold , there is a chaotic but potentially creative neutral zone when things are not the way they were, but are not really the new way either. These three phases- ending, neutral zone, beginning- are in fact transition.

We also resist transition because it takes longer than change, and leaves us in limbo, while a replacement reality and a new self is gradually being formed. Another reason people resist transition is that it sets up resonance between the present and painful experiences in the past. It is as though the latter experience of loss vibrates and sets other, older losses on the same wavelength, vibrating sympathetically. Transition not only recalls old hurts, but it also threatens to throw us back into the state we were in before the status quo was established. The circumstances of our present lives often serve to protect us from painful recollections of the way we used to feel about ourselves before things existed. When those circumstances go away or fall apart, we are left exposed to our old self-doubts and anxieties.

In its most basic function, transition helps you come to terms with the anxieties of change. It’s an age old story: you think you are heading toward India, and you end up in the West Indies; you run after the ball, and you fall down the rabbit hole. You think you are doing one thing, and all the time you are busy doing another. Many of the biggest transformations come when you think you are just trying to reestablish the status quo. Transition reorients you so that you can mobilize your energy to deal successfully with your new situation instead of being hampered by attitudes and behaviors that were developed for and more appropriate to your old situation.

Concretely, transition serves 5 functions within our lives: reorientation, personal growth, authentication, creativity, and renewal. Reorientation is refers to that process as a turning in the way we go through life. Personal growth refers to the way reorientation brings us into a new and more adequate relationship to the world around us. Authentication refers to the inner face of growth, where the result is not just appropriate but is also some way of being that is true to who we really are, rather than to a persona or a role. Each of these functions grows out of the creative opportunity that comes to us in the form of “the chaos” or “the empty field” or “the fallow time” of that neutral zone of transition. Each of these metaphors is a way of framing the confusion that most people experience there. It is the nothingness that we find there that gives the neutral zone its power, not something that we encounter in that in-between state. Besides these five functions the sixth function serves to unify the experience. Transition renews us. It is as though the breakdown of the old reality releases energy that has been trapped in the form of our old lives and converts it back into its original state of pure and formless energy. Transition is more than simply how we get from here to there, because it often presents us with a there that we did not expect- a there that is shaped by a creative and developmental functions of the transitional journey itself.

So how then does this apply to CrossFit or Sport or anything athletic? Since there are periods of transition throughout life, we can easily see the periods of transition in CrossFit. Whether this be the time you decide to begin CrossFit, or the moment you decide to increase your intensity in your WODs, those moments of transition help to create a new definition of you. It is in the silence, uncertainty, and confusion where those directions and answers will come. It is never about the arrival, but the journey itself that defines us.

So far, it has just been the space that has changed at WCCF. And, while we don’t know what is coming, it’s going to be pretty cool! Congratulations to the entire WCCF coaching staff for entering into their own phase of transition. Let the journey begin!