Mental Training - Sport Psychology MP3
PhD Sport Psych Jared Wood joins us today to talk about the importance of communication with teammates, and the mental benefits of talking in practice, competition, even in the weight room.
Jared was a collegiate football player before earning his Phd, and has extensive experience with golfers, football players, and athletes of all stripes.
He’s @woodjared on twitter, and he’s writing a book called ‘It’s Only Cold on One Sideline”.
Competitive Ski racer, and bi-national Sport Psychology consultant Dr Haley Perlus joins the Athlete’s Audio Academy to discuss the idea of competitive anxiety….those nervous feelings that creep in at crunch time, or when you feel pressure.
We’re focusing that conversation on skiing (since that’s Dr. Perlus’ background), but the ideas that we discuss will be relevant to any athlete.
Haley is a doctor of sport and exercise psychology. She is an expert at empowering individuals to achieve peak performance. A former elite athlete, Whistler Cup Alpine Ski Racing Champion, Coach, group fitness instructor, and fitness trainer, Haley has devoted her life to sport and exercise and understands the difficulty of overcoming performance blocks so that people can consistently perform to the best of their ability.
She’s also the creator of the Ultimate Achievement Journal, Daily inspiration or Peak Fitness Results.
I’ll admit it. I hated school. I could never understand how any of it was going to apply to my real life. But I wanted to learn new stuff. So my teachers had to figure out a way to serve up the new stuff in a way that I could see how it was going to be applicable.
I had to ‘eat my peas…without knowing I was eating my peas’
I’m sure that’s how a lot of athletic coaches feel about incorporating mental skills training into their work with individuals and teams. They’re interested in anything that will help their teams win, but are either not sure where to start, or don’t know how to incorporate the brain-work into their coaching.
Enter Larry Lauer, whose resume is as long as your arm:
He’s kind of a big deal, and his passion is helping Coaches understand the mental skills. If you coach kids of any age, and ability level, Larry is someone you should know. You can connect with Sport Psychology Pro Larry Lauer here and here, and read his blogs on Tennis, and Hockey.
He’s here today on the Athlete’s Audio Academy to talk about some of the language that Sport Psychology professionals can use to help coaches understand the mental skills.
Super-enthusiastic Brian Levenson, MA, Sport Psychology holds the theory that there is no such thing as momentum for great athletes. (Only for sportscasters, and armchair QB’s)
Great athletes, by contrast are present in the moment, and focused on things that they can control.
Brian has some tips for athletes to avoid the idea of momentum, and do the things that the pros do when they’re playing on this weeks edition of the Athlete’s Audio Academy.
Brian Levenson is a mental training consultant based in the Washington D.C. area. Born and raised in the D.C. suburbs, Brian moved to San Francisco to get his M.A. in Sport Psychology. Brian has worked with athletes in a wide range of sports, including basketball, tennis, and golf.
If you search Sport Psychology on google, on YouTube, or just about anywhere, the first FEW entries that will come up in your search are the brainchildren of Dr. Patrick Cohn, our guest today on the Athlete’s Audio Academy.
Dr Cohn has been among the world’s most visible and celebrated Sport Psychology professionals in the world for over 20 years, and we discuss the topic of perfectionism in sports.
He blogs regularly, and hosts a website that’s a fantastic resource for athletes, parents, and coaches at peaksports.com, and his YouTube Channel, Mindset for Sports is also a fantastic resource for all athletes, parents, and coaches.
Dr. Cohn is the president and founder of Peak Performance Sports in Orlando, Florida. Experts in the field of sports psychology consider him the leading authority on mental skills for entering the zone and pre-performance routines, largely based upon his extensive research. He is a mentor to many in the field of sports psychology and provides performance enhancement skills through mental game coaching for individual and team athletes.
He has consulted with high profile teams such as the Miami Dolphins, NASCAR winners, NHL Players, National Motocross Champions, and PGA Tour professional golfers.
Dr Cohn is a leading provider of electronic, online, and CD programs to help athletes coaches and parents, and he’s also frequently quoted in major publications, and you can read all of those here!
Can you picture the typical pre-game psych-up session? All the players yelling, dancing, and getting fired up with some loud, killer music? Or the coach giving a really passionate speech to the the troops all riled up…
What if that was exactly the wrong way to get ready to play your best? Turns out that it’s just about the worst way to get prepared.
There’s an optimal level of intensity for competition, and it varies by sport, position, and even individual.
Sport Psychologist Dr. Jim Taylor has written extensively on the optimal intensity for performance, and coached hundreds of athletes on the topic. He’s the mental training expert today on the Athlete’s Audio Academy, and he’s been with us before to talk about imagery, and about confidence.
Dr. Taylor is the author of 12 books and blogs on business, sports, parenting, technology, education, politics, and popular culture on his web site, as well as on psychologytoday.com, huffingtonpost.com.
Dr. Taylor has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends, UPN’s Life & Style, ABC’s World News This Weekend
Our second visit with Sport Psychology pro Angus Mugford of the IMG Academies (Here’s the first). Angus works with a team of Mental Conditioning Coaches @IMGAcademies under the direction of Travis Moawad.
Angus has got some ideas here on goal setting, to contrast two previous interviews with Josh Lifrak, and Rob Bell. We discuss outcome goals (the big ‘WHY’), process goals, and performance goals for sports. It turns out everyone’s right on their perspective!
He is the Head of the IMG Academies Mental Conditioning Division, managing a staff of 9 consultants and developing programs for junior and professional athletes and coaches. Through his understanding and application of skills, Angus trains athletes in group and individual settings, across a wide range of sports and consulting with NCAA Division 1 programs, athletes from the WTA and ATP tour, NFL and NBA.
I think of it as the ‘Walled City of Oz’. That magical place where nobody really knows what goes on inside, but we all suspect that it’s pretty amazing and magical.
Even the people who are there call it a ‘Sports Utopia’.
Meet Angus Mugford, PhD of the IMG Academies. He joins the Athlete’s Audio Academy to give us a peek inside the tent. The IMG Academy was started by Nick Bollettieri, and among the sports represented with physical skills and strength training, the IMG Performance Institute houses Angus, and the other 7 mental skills coaching professionals.
Angus also shares some info about Combine360.com, an new online community that IMG, and UnderArmour have started to create a benchmark for measuring and improving athletic performance. Cool. Here’s the assessment and philosophy.
Angus holds a PhD in Sport Studies (specialization in sport/counseling psychology) from the University of Kansas,(and I published the interview EVEN THOUGH I went to Mizzou!) and is a Certified Consultant with Association of Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) and British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences (BASES), which are two of the world’s top sport psychology professional organizations. He is also a member of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) Sport Psychology registry.
Find more information on twitter for Angus & IMG, and dial in to the IMG Performance Blog, or Facebook page.
Picture this situation as an athlete…and see if it’s ever happened to you:
‘Like two minutes ago, I was playing GREAT! Now I can barely hit the ball!! WHAT HAPPENED!!’
Framed through the Masters collapse, and US Open triumph of Rory McIlroy, PhD Sport Psychologist from the Minneapolis area Dr. Justin Anderson joins us today to talk some mental toughness, resiliency, and how the brain works (and changes) when faced with the ‘zone’ or faced with everything falling apart. (As documented in this article in the BBC)
There are changes at the neural level in high pressure situations. Flow, Self 2 (in the language of the Inner Game of Tennis), Muscle memory is the goal…but when the pressure cooks up…the chemistry in your head moves to different areas of your brain. Your brain chemistry actually changes, and a new alchemy kicks in that the athlete doesn’t experience very often…let alone their normal state!
Your brain changes, your body tenses up…LOTS of inhibitive changes all at once. Imagine how hard it is to hit a shot in THAT mindset!
Dr Anderson gives some GREAT tips on how to recognize some of your own self-talk, and tension growing in yourself, and how to get refocused on the present & the goal! Even setting appropriate goals for learning from experiences, or reframing, are tips that you’ll hear in this Athlete’s Audio interview.
Dr Justin Anderson is a licensed Sport Psychologist in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in sport and performance psychology, organizational psychology (primarily with family-owned and privately held businesses), and counseling psychology. He publishes a blog on Sport Psychology topics, and can be found on twitter.
As an aside to our interview…preparation, and practice in all of the different physical and mental conditions that you’ll face is key to staying focused in competition. Check this out to see how Rory practices. The money quote is the last sentence: “So I can prepare…just like I’m there really.”
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Ahh, July, when a cyclist’s thoughts turn to Northern France for the start of Le Tour. Shots of fields of sunflowers…Phil and Paul on TV at ungodly hours of the US morning ramping up the excitement for the finale. “Pedals turned in anger”…The Tour de France is upon us once again.
Computer screens in offices all over North America are avoiding work with one TDF streaming package or another. All seems right with the world.
That’s what’s in our minds as we watch…but what’s in the rider’s mind? (The effective rider at least!)?
Carrie Cheadle knows. She’s a Sport Psychology consultant in the Bay Area, and she works with lots of endurance athletes, adding mental skills to their toolbox. She is to mental training for endurance athletes what @dwuori is to cycling comedy…that is, a top flight pro.
We discuss the different mental challenges of different kinds of stages, Flat stages in the first week; (where the challenge is focus, concentration, and attention), the high mountains (where confidence, the psychology of suffering, and imagery come into play), and the time trial stages; (again, suffering, pacing, pushing yourself, and goal setting are the skills).
Carrie is sponsoring Neil Browne’s (@neilroad) Online ‘Roadside’ Chats during the Tour (Athlete’s Audio is too…stage 12!) , and has more information about the skills mentioned in our Athlete’s Audio Academy interview on her youtube channel. Check her out at CarrieCheadle.com and follow @FeedTheAthlete on twitter. I was lucky enough to interview her last year at the Association of Applied Sport Psychology conference on the topic of race-day fears.
Carrie Cheadle lives in Petaluma, just north of San Francisco, California and has been consulting with teams, organizations, and individual athletes since 2002.
She has written a number of articles for many organizations including Nimble Training and Team Swift. She has been interviewed as an expert resource for articles that have appeared in VeloNews, Outside Magazine, Bicycling Magazine, Sporting Kid, Snowboard Canada, Men’s Fitness, as well as various local media outlets. She has been on the “Form & Fitness” expert panel for Cyclingnews.com since 2007.
Carrie received her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and Sonoma State University and her Master of Arts degree in sport psychology at John. F. Kennedy University. Her professional affiliations include membership with AASP (Association for Applied Sport Psychology) since 2002, becoming an AASP certified consultant in 2007. She is also a member of IDEA Health & Fitness Association and a member of APA (American Psychological Association) Division 47, Exercise and Sport Psychology. Carrie is also adjunct faculty for both Dominican University of California and John F. Kennedy University teaching undergraduate and graduate level sport psychology classes
We’re pretty friendly…