Mental development skills for athletes

By Abe Williams (Sports blogger, writer, radio commentator and sports sociologist)

In my personal transition that I am undergoing, I thought it fit to write about something dear to me and how appropriate in dealing with mental development, a skill that needs to be mastered by every athlete that wishes to achieve success in his/her career.

Let’s look at well-known sprinter, Usain Bolt. In his fastest races he had to execute his technique to perfection. One can dissect a 100m race in these categories: The driving phase, the striding phase and the finishing phase. Because Bolt is 6ft6 it means that it would normally take him longer to build into maximum velocity before he gets into the stride phase, which is his strength. But for him to run world record times, he had to work on his technique to adjust mentally not to be too over-reliant on his long strides and powerful finish only but to work on his start and driving phase.

In mastering this skill, it gave him the edge over his competitors and afforded him complete confidence to the point where it is just a matter of replicating in the race what he has been working for hours in practice. It might appear that Bolt’s mental preparation technique prior to the race is unorthodox and somewhat cocky and arrogant but don’t be fooled as he do have a carefully planned strategy and is ready to execute in the race what he has been visualizing in his mind hundreds of times once the gun goes off.

Another example is Michael Phelps. His coach, Bob Bowman, trained him from a very young age to be prepared for every aspect of a race from dealing with high-pressure events to anything from good and bad things that might happen during a race. If his goggles break or his suit rip or tear, his nervous system is trained to know exactly what to do. I spoke about visualisation in a previous article. Phelps uses this mental training technique to prepare himself mentally. He visualizes a race from the stands, from within the pool and plans for scenarios like, what to do if he trails with one lap to go, a poor start or a perfect race and puts him in positions how to deal with all these scenarios in a race. His mental self-reliance is his biggest strength.

Most champion athletes uses these techniques to prepare them how to deal with the most adverse circumstances during a race, match or event. It is refined and it gets better over time and you don’t see the benefit of mental preparation immediately and might not see the need to persist. However mental development will proof to be invaluable when that ‘big match’ happens on that day and you will feel exposed for not being mentally prepared. I have seen provincial and international players in tears over missed kicks, missed tackles, failed shots, dropped catches and costing their teams matches.

With community sports that is pulling larger crowds and enjoying a more prominent support base than in the past, coaches would need to emphasize on the importance of mental toughness and start coaching coping techniques in order for players to remain controlled and composed in whatsoever circumstance.

An example can be where a fullback in a rugby match trains visualizing catching an up-and-under in windy conditions. During this exercise he needs to close his eyes and be in a quiet and peaceful environment. He then visualizes the wind against his body, the crowd, the defence closing in on him, the sun or rain, how he/she position him/herself, how he/she jumps or remain grounded to catch the ball. The idea is to visualize as much detail as possible. The player must see him/herself catching that ball to perfection and have other scenarios where he gets tackled, knocks the ball and what happens thereafter. If there is space to attack, is there support runners for when he/she attack? All those scenarios can be worked out with Imagery or Visualisation. Other techniques that can be studied and applied is Self-talk.