Brains In The Family

Focus On Fun Gets Teens Active

Emphasizing the emotional benefits of exercise is more effective at increasing levels of physical activity than highlighting traditional health benefits. This is the finding of research published online today, 17th February 2010, in the British Journal of Health Psychology. 

The study was carried out by Reema Sirriyeh and colleagues from the University of Leeds. Reema said: "There is evidence that people who believe that physical activity is enjoyable and fun are more likely to engage in sport and exercise. We investigated whether highlighting the emotional benefits of sport and exercise to young people increased their levels of physical activity, more than highlighting the physical health benefits." 

Simple Test To Judge If Athletes Sustained A Concussion

Over the years, student-athletes have come to my office with similar complaints about "not feeling like themselves."  They felt like they were in a fog at times, dealing with mood swings more pronounced than in the past, and/or their sports and academic performance was less consistent.  As a Therapeutic Learning Specialist and Applied Performance Counselor, I help students and athletes understand why they are experiencing certain mental challenges and determine ways to adjust. 

These athletes, however, had one thing in common. They all experienced multiple head contact during play over the last few years that had concussion-like symptoms.  They all returned to play immediately or soon after each incident in sports that have high probabilities of head contact.  

One problem coaches, athletic trainers, and parents experience in helping athletes is the availability of a simple test to determine whether athletes have sustained a concussion in order to manage care.  Well, there may be such a test now available.

Sports Relaxation: Learning To Relax During Competition

As a Sports Psychology Counselor, one of the most helpful lessons I teach clients is how to stay "appropriately" relaxed during competition.  To many athletes and coaches, this notion seems counter intuitive.  Aren't athletes supposed to get really "pumped up" not relaxed?  The answer is partially yes.  Athletes need to be mentally and physically aroused (such as having the right level of blood flowing through your body) in order to respond to fast moving action.  And, at the same time, they need to stay relaxed enough to remain mentally and physically flexible and not use unnecessary energy.

The following is a good article about relaxation in sports and includes different techniques that can help you.  To learn more, you can visit my website www.atalentedmind.com.



Before Hustling to Finish, Relaxed Is a Good Way to Start

By GINA KOLATA
Published: NY Times, October 1, 2008



LIKE so many people around the world, Dr. Michael Joyner was transfixed watching Michael Phelps swim in the Summer Olympics. But while many of us focused on Mr. Phelps’s world records, Dr. Joyner, a competitive Masters swimmer and an exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic, noticed something else.

“I have never seen anyone so relaxed in the water,” he said.

Relaxation. It is a trait that is often underappreciated, coaches and athletic trainers say. Yet it can make the difference between doing your best and not doing well, between feeling dragged down or soaring. Coaches search for better ways to teach it. And many athletes, including some of the world’s best, work on it constantly. An ability to relax while pushing hard, exercise researchers say, is one reason why winners win.

“It’s the paradox of athletics,” said Rick DeMont, associate head coach for men’s swimming at the University of Arizona and a former Olympian. “Tension is slow, tension is inefficient. You need to be relaxed.” And relaxation can be taught.

“If a person is willing to learn, they will learn it,” said Ralph Reiff, a certified athletic trainer and director of St. Vincent Sports Performance Center in Indianapolis.  Coaches agree.

“Some started in a better position than others, but nearly everyone I’ve ever had can improve,” said Clyde Hart, the director of track and field at Baylor University. Mr. Hart has coached some of the world’s best runners, including Michael Johnson and Jeremy Wariner. He now coaches Sanya Richards, who won bronze and gold medals at the Beijing Games.

Yet relaxation also is a mysterious state and hard to describe. It’s one of those situations in which you know it when you achieve it.

Athletes who get there “always feel wonderful,” Mr. DeMont said. But, he adds, “you don’t get there by trying really hard to get there.”

In a sense, relaxation goes against most athletes’ instincts. Mr. Hart likes to point out the way elementary and middle school children run. “The kids throw their heads back,” Mr. Hart said. “They think that the harder they go, the faster they run.” That sort of body tension is the first thing Mr. Hart tries to correct. “The quickest way to improve a kid is to teach him to relax,” Mr. Hart said.

But it’s also important for athletes to realize that relaxing does not mean slowing down. “A lot of athletes don’t know the difference between relaxing and not running,” Mr. Hart said. With runners, he said, the upper body must relax but, he added, “the lower body is going to run.”

One of his tricks is to have athletes concentrate on relaxing their eyes. “If they’re wide eyed, they’re tense,” Mr. Hart said. “I tell runners to run sleepy eyed. It’s like pouring a soothing oil over the body.” As the eyes relax, the face starts to relax, the jaw relaxes and then, Mr. Hart said, he tells runners to let the feeling spread through the shoulders and arms.

“You want your arms to be your rhythm,” he said. “They may not help you, but they can hurt you big time if your arms are tense and you are gripping your hands tightly.”

Mr. DeMont said that in track and swimming it helps to relax the lower jaw and make sure you are breathing with your diaphragm and your stomach.

And Mr. Reiff said that he tells runners to stay tall, avoiding the rolled shoulders and tight upper body form that comes with fatigue and being too tense. He tells them to rehearse the phrase, “stay tall” to themselves while they run. And, he said, coaches or a friend on the sideline during a race can shout it out if a runner shows tenseness.

“If you are a coach on the sideline and holler to your runners, ‘stay tall,’ all of a sudden they lift themselves out of that position,” Mr. Reiff said.

People like Michael Phelps, these experts say, are masters of relaxation, able to get into a rhythm and stay there even with the intense pressure of Olympic competition.

For example, Mr. DeMont said, when Mr. Phelps swam, his stroke count remained the same in every lap. A tense and inefficient swimmer, he added, will take more strokes with every lap of the pool. Mr. Phelps, he said, “was able to nail it every time.” He is, Mr. DeMont said, “a rhythm master.”

COACHES and athletic trainers say athletes always know when they relax. Mr. DeMont asks people to remember the best they ever did in a race or in training. “Think of how darn good it felt,” he said. “That’s the feeling you are after.”

It makes sense to Dr. Joyner. He explained that when people start to train and compete, these experiences of being relaxed happen at random. “But if you pay attention you can increase the odds of them happening again and again,” he said. “To me this is what people talk about when they say they are ‘in the zone.’ ”

It happened to Dr. Joyner recently when he ran a half marathon after what he said was minimal training. Somehow he finished the race in 1 hour 38 minutes, a result that shocked him.

“It’s a strange thing because at some level you are reading the fatigue and ‘pain’ from your body and using it to get and stay right on the razor’s edge,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I put pain in quotes because you hurt, but it is not painful in the traditional sense because you are using it and you are not fearful and are just sort of ‘right there.’ ”

“It was interesting when I ran that half marathon,” Dr. Joyner said. “I had not run a race in like 11 years but I was able to get right into a rhythm and just sort of do it. What did Yogi say? ‘It was like déjà vu all over again.’ ”

“At some level,” Dr. Joyner added, “everyone I know who has been a hard-core endurance athlete for many years is a covert religious mystic due to these types of experiences.”

Sports Psychology: Visualizing athlete’s ideal performance

When competing, some athletes feel unprepared, as if they are experiencing a situation for the first time.  While they know how to execute basic skills, they have difficulty reading situations in competition which can make them feel stressed and worried.  One solution is to make sure everything about a competition feels familiar.  One technique athletes can use to totally prepare their mind and body for competition is called previewing or visualizing. 

Visualizing can be a powerful method to prepare for games by imagining the ideal performance you want to create as an athlete.  You can also imagine yourself in a game situation you fear and visualize yourself successfully responding to that situation.  In short, you need to imagine all of the details of the performance you want to create so, when you are in competition, everything seems familiar.  The following provides you with the steps to preview your performance successfully before you are in competition or practice:

First, get your body into a relaxed position in a quiet surrounding, with soft music playing if needed

Second, start focusing on your breathing

Third, breathe slowly in through your nose and out through your mouth

Fourth, breathe deeply a few times to fill up your lungs, and fully exhale

Fifth, start visualizing the performance you want to create for a game or match.  Visualize the full game experience from the time you are getting dressed for competition to the time you arrive back home.

Sixth, use all of your senses when you visualize the performance: What do you see, hear, touch, smell and taste?  By visualizing with all of your senses, you totally immerse yourself into every aspect of the performance you want to create.

Seventh, you can visualize the perfect performance on one occasion during a week, and visualize yourself successfully responding to an error or difficult situation during another session that same week.  You should always visualize yourself being successful.  Visualize before games and practices.  Visualize your ideal performance at least three times a week and on the day of a competition

When you mentally visualize the ideal performance you want to create, your body also responds in small, unnoticeable ways so you are preparing both your mind and body.  As an athlete, the more you preview your performance, the better you will become at using this technique to prepare yourself for competition.  If you are a parent or coach, you can teach your athletes how to preview practices and competition so you train their minds while training their bodies.

To learn additional mental skills for athletes, visit A Talented Mind library.