In October 2009, I blogged about Lewis Pugh’s upcoming swim at Mt. Everest. Now, almost a year later, I finally stumbled across this great video lecture of Lewis Pugh himself giving his reaction to the swim.

The video is from a TED Conference, which started out as a symposium for Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED), but has evolved into a small nonprofit and platform for Ideas Worth Spreading. The full transcript and video are available from TED.com, here is a small excerpt:

“I swam as quickly as I could for the first hundred meters, and then I realized very, very quickly, I had a huge problem on my hands. I could barely breathe. I was gasping for air. I then began to choke, and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water. And it all happened so quickly I then — I don’t know how it happened — but I went underwater.”

Watch the full video below to learn about how the Mt. Everest swim taught Lewis Pugh a radical new way to approach swimming, and think about climate change.

You can learn more about Lewis’ training in a video by Speedo (posted on the17thman). I also pulled these quotes from the lecture transcript because Lewis Pugh has some great perspective on mental training:

“there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind” – Lewis Pugh (1:24 on video above)

“I put on my iPod, I listened to some music, I got myself as aggressive as possible — but controlled aggression — and then I hurled myself into that water.” – Lewis Pugh (5:00 on video above)

I read a fascinating post titled “Crossing your fingers boosts performance (touch wood)” on the Sweat Science Blog. The post refers to an article published in Psychological Science by lead author Lysann Damisch in which participants performed golf putts, and other motor dexterity, memory and anagram challenges.

In the case of the golf putt, the participants were either informed that their golf ball has been lucky so far, or that it is simply the ball that everyone has been using, before performing 10 golf putts. “Sure enough, the lucky ball group hit 6.42 putts, while the neutral ball group hit just 4.75″ (source).

Because I’m not going to pay to read the full text of the article, I don’t know how many participants were used in the study. However, the use of a control group definitely lends credibility to the study – whereas I usually attribute perceptions of luck to a simple confirmation bias.

The proposed mechanism for luck boosting performance is an increase in self-efficacy. Self-efficacy can be confused with self confidence, but it has less to do with a general sense of certainty and more to do with a belief in one’s capabilities to perform specific tasks in relation to goals.

Some rituals and superstitions that involve stretching, increasing physical readiness (jumping up and down), or routines that help you focus do not influence luck in this same way. These habits have their own physical and mental mechanisms for improving performance. However, it is interesting that the presence of a charm or other arbitrarily lucky object can produce a testable improvement in performance by increasing a participant’s beliefs in their ability to succeed in context of the situation.

Whether you’re making a New Year’s Resolution, or trying to refocus your training as championship season draws closer, you’ve probably heard a lot about goal setting – but have you bothered to learn about the different goal setting strategies? So your 2009 goals flopped and you’re ready to chalk it up to mental hocus-pocus – as 2010 approaches, consider taking a second look at goal setting to see what you’ve been doing wrong.

Scenario 1: Competitive Swimmer Takes ‘Turn’ for the Worse
A college sprinter wants to drop time in his 100 Free. His current best time is 47.34 but dreams of breaking 45.99. His stroke technique and breathing are fairly sound, but his coach sees room for improvement in his turns, especially in his streamline.

The swimmer goes online and finds an article about S.M.A.R.T. Goal Setting, and decides to set Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely goals for himself. His coach told him that he should write down his goals to help him reach them, so this is what his goal setting sheet looks like:

In the next few meets, his time fluctuated between 47.28 and 47.45. He felt panicked when it was time to start taper, unconvinced that he would drop time before the conference meet. He ended the season with a time of 47.30, blamed the bulk-head for a lousy turn, and decided that writing down your goals doesn’t help.

How To Fix Scenario 1: Do Your Homework
The story in Scenario 1 exhibits a lot of the common pitfalls experienced when an athlete skims the surface of sport psychology literature – often looking for a quick fix. Briefly reading about a sport psychology technique won’t do much for your performance if you don’t follow through. You have to put in the work! Reading an article on the bench press won’t make you stronger overnight – but it can be a great starting point to then apply scientifically tested methods to your training program.

So what could the swimmer in Scenario 1 have done to improve his chances of success? Well, in his favor, it’s impossible to argue that his goal wasn’t specific enough. He knows exactly how much time he needs to drop to reach a measurable, attainable, specific goal. However, his goal setting process is the same as trying to drive to New York City by looking at a postcard – the destination is very clear, but he doesn’t have a map!

In the SMART acronym, the “realistic” consideration implies devising a plan to reach the goal. However, in the SMART goal setting plan, this is somewhat glossed over while the main emphasis is put on setting an objective goal. I like to think in terms of goal strategies, more of a philosophy to motivate and track your progress toward a long term idea. Your goal philosophy or strategy should encompass mental and physical training, practice and competitions, long and short term checkpoints, involve social support, and be internalized in positive terminology. In other words, it’s much more complicated than simply setting a SMART goal.

The draw is a simple, marketable catch-phrase that seems like a quick fix. In reality, goal setting is interconnected with the mental components of focus, imagery, motivation, skill acquisition, and so many others (just as swimming skill is tied into physical training, nutrition, mental state, reaction time, etc.). So it’s no wonder this swimmer turned his back on goal setting when it didn’t magically make him faster. He didn’t do his homework and put in the effort needed to get the most out of goal setting. Entire books are written on goal setting alone! To help guide your research, here is a good list of the 12 Principles of Goal Setting .

Here’s an example of how the swimmer in Scenario 1 could have planned his goal strategy. Notice how, although he has the same SMART goal listed, he has defined and written out components of the process that will eventually take him there. He’s given himself a map, or plan for meeting the challenge. With more time and evaluation, his plan could get much more personalized and detailed – this is just a short example.

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What happens when someone does their homework and puts in the time to develop a detailed goal setting plan, but still doesn’t succeed? In this next scenario, a retired swimmer is thinking about getting off the couch and hitting the pool again, but finds it very difficult to stick with his fitness plan.

Scenario 2: I Really Mean It This Time
A former high school state champion has fallen out of shape. He hasn’t been to the pool in 15 years, and hasn’t been to the gym in 3 years. He’s been trying to think of a way to balance his work schedule with a daily workout, so he joined a Masters swimming program in hopes that his membership fee would motivate him to keep going. After two weeks of going every day, he sleeps in and misses a practice. He doesn’t go back the rest of that week, and then finds himself busy getting things ready for relatives to visit.

He reads about goal setting strategies and writes a detailed plan for his return to swimming greatness, but finds that his plan to correct his kick is useless when he doesn’t show up to practice in the first place. He vows to return to the pool whenever he has time, and makes it his New Year’s Resolution to once and for all get back in shape – “I mean it this time!”

How To Fix Scenario 2: You’re Addicted To NOT Working Out
The traditional view of goal setting works well for individuals who can focus on their training without other distractions. However, for someone preparing to change their entire lifestyle, specific training goals are extremely hard to stick to and turn out to be of little help.

How many times have you decided to get back into your workout, you “really mean it this time,” and you buy some fancy new lifting gloves, running shoes, and $100 goggles – only to end up using them once before life makes another surprise change to your daily routine. The problem is that life includes a lot of unexpected changes, and a detailed performance goal is very vulnerable to disruption from changes in motivation, energy, budget, and free time.

In this situation, being a little subjective might be the answer! It seems counter-intuitive, because goal setting guidelines usually suggest nailing down goals in concrete measureable terms. However, by using the Stages of Change Model you can increase your overall tendency to live an active lifestyle by thinking BIG PICTURE. The Stages of Change Model is a cyclical model of behavior change that is usually seen in the treatment of addiction (such as smoking cessation) but works just as well with sedentary people who want to start living a healthy lifestyle. The model incorporates gradual behavior change, abundant social support, and even includes a rebound pathway in anticipation of failure!

Here are the stages of change as listed by Addiction Alternatives:

“The idea behind the Stages of Change Model is that behavior change does not happen in one step. Rather, people tend to progress through different stages on their way to successful change. Also, each of us progresses through the stages at our own rate” (source).

While it is still appropriate to have specific, measurable goals along the way – the big picture approach to gradual behavior change makes the Stages of Change Model more appropriate for making big, generalized lifestyle changes (rather than tweaking a specific performance aspect).

Evaluate your own goal setting approach, not just the goals themselves. You may have a SMART goal with no plan, or a lofty general goal for a very specific correction – find these situations and correct your strategy before abandoning goal-setting completely. Remember, mental training techniques won’t fix things overnight (you didn’t learn to swim in a day either!). Stick with it and look to others for help!

-Eric Teske

I found a sport psychology gem in an article posted on DivingTube.com. As the name implies, the site is set up to be the YouTube of online diving videos. If more people used the site, it would undoubtedly serve as an incredible resource. I know a lot of diving coaches who are eager to get their hands on diving videos of specific dives from a variety of angles.

In any case, I found the article Psychological Issues & Competition Pressure to be right on the mark and very well written. Its works cited section resembles my graduate school bookshelf, and gives specific examples in the training of a fictional diver named Flint while at the same time providing extremely thorough support for the advice given on the topic.

Here’s an excerpt from the section on Practice Specificity:

“It is also important to complement the practice variability training with practice specificity. Flint’s training should incorporate scenarios that are similar or identical to his competition experience. When competition scenarios are incorporated into training the diver learns about the competition context when the dive is practised automatically without being explicitly instructed to do so.”

Read the full article to learn more about utilizing optimal practice schedules and different types of feedback.

This video comes from YouthSportPsychology.com, and provides a free 6 minute lecture on How Young Athletes Become Frustrated while providing a model for parents and coaches to consider.

The article The ethics of neuroscience in sport, on TheUbyssey.ca, provides some new information on the ways athletes use advances in neuroscience to their advantage.

Specifically, the article mentions the prevalent use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe the human brain in action. Since the 1990′s fMRI’s have observed the brain under almost all conceivable conditions. Ok, this is an exaggeration, but fMRI’s are commonly used in research. They produce an animation of brain activity rather than just a snapshot of the soft tissue itself. By correlatinig these activations with moods and emotions, reserachers have some basic understanding of what activity in different parts of the brain means.

Stanford-trained neurologist, Dr. Judy Illes, says that fMRI’s are becoming more common in sports research too – and the Canadian swim team was quick to take advantage of this development. Here is an excerpt from the article that talks about the Canadian swim team’s use of fMRI:

“Hap Davis, the team’s psychologist, uses fMRI technology to provide feedback on aquatic performance. An article published in the June 2008 issue of Brain Imaging and Behavior demonstrated that the swimmers who watched a video of their own poor performance had increased activity in emotional centres of the brain associated with depression. More significantly, they correlated this depressive state with decreased activity in parts of the cerebral cortex essential for planning movement.” (source)

Coach Davis, in an interview with Science Magazine, gave some insight into how these results have affected their training strategy. When negativity is sensed, coaches intervene right away to avoid the depressed states suggested by the fMRI. Interventions consist of visualization of positive swimming experiences, or jumping jacks.

This is all very interesting, and I was amazed to read that the Canadian national team actually changes their coaching tactics based on functional MRI’s. It’s very pro-active, but perhaps they are jumping the gun.

Functional MRI’s can help psychologists determine what is going on in the athlete’s mind without relying on questionnaires or surveys. The idea is to remove the self-report bias, and get down to cold hard neurology. The problem is, by identifying which areas of the brain “light up” when participants think about various emotions, the researchers are left with a correlation of activity in an area –> emotion. Remember that correlations don’t imply cause and effect. This means when an area of the brain “lights up,” researchers have a better guess what emotions are experienced.

On the other hand, the study described above showed a correlation between a depressive state and decreased activity in the parts of the cerebral cortex essential for planning movement. It would be very difficult to use a questionnaire to determine if an athlete was making connections in a specific part of the brain.

The article also introduces the possibility of improving on the mood of athletes to avoid a decrease, or perhaps even enhancing movement planning. Selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are often used to treat depression, and are not banned on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) list of controlled substances. If the relationship between mood and the ability to plan movements turned out to be a signifficant one, enhancement through the use of SSRI’s could be seen as legal “mood doping.”

Hmmm, it’s all very interesting…

> Tom Daley: Olympic bust-ups, bullying and embarrassing dads Times Online
> Should Sports be ‘Dumbed Down?’ MomsTeam.com
> Hardy returns to competition following suspension Associated Press
> 93-year-old swims for third gold medal at Senior Games Enterprise News
> Tom Daley: ‘If I had a girlfriend, she’d have to understand that… Telegraph.co.uk
> Micheal Phelps: Avoiding the Deep End When It Comes To Jitters Through Your Body
> Lord Coe believes there is support for the London Olympics Telegraph.co.uk
> Sports Hollywood: 10 Questions with Dara Torres Sports Hollywood

Alissa Finerman has been providing motivation and coaching advice on Universal Sports’ “Competitive Edge” for the past two months. Since June 5th, she has already written 9 different articles ranging from the power of setting goals to understanding your comfort zone.

I think it’s great to see sport psychology-related articles on a mainstream site like Universal Sports. The sport psych movement has really been building speed in the past 30 years or so. Check out our sport psychology topics tag, just click the related links below.

Alissa has been providing her services as a life coach and motivational speaker through her own company, Finerman Living. She has worked with both athletes and business executives, which seems to come naturally to someone who is at home both on Wall Street and in the professional tennis circuit.

I think she sounds exhaustively enthusiastic! But it’s good to know there are living spark plugs out there to help get the rest of us up and running.

Check out Alissa Finerman’s Competitive Edge articles on UniversalSports.com.

Everyone has probably experienced the feeling of butterflies in their stomach at some point. This classic metaphor describes the sensation of a “tickling” or “fluttery” feeling in the stomach that is generally associated with nervous excitement.

The sensation of butterflies is most likely caused by the release of epinephrine from the adrenal glands, which causes a chemical reaction in your body often associated with “fight or flight.” Epinephrine causes blood from non-essential body processes (like digestion) to be redirected to more immediate resources like the brain and muscles. This temporary loss of blood to the stomach is probably the reason for a number of symptoms of nervousness: loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, and butterflies.

Generally, people would rather not experience butterflies before a big meet or event because they can be distracting, make you lose confidence, or second-guess how prepared you are. However, David Bellinger, a sport performance consultant with Excellence in Sport Performance (Pleasanton, CA) recently wrote an article for Gymnastike titled “Making Those Butterflies Fly In Formation” (link).

In his article, Bellinger says that “nervousness is only a problem if it prevents you from performing your best,” and explains that being nervous shows that you care about something or that it is important to you (like doing well in competition). It’s much easier to manage a few butterflies than it is to deal with a complete lack of effort, or apathy towards competition.

Bellinger continues:

“If you have butterflies in your stomach, the goal is not necessarily to get rid of all of them, but to get them to fly together in formation. You want to get the optimal amount of nervousness for you, and then channel your nervous energy into helping you perform your best.” (source)

Everyone has their own optimal energy level that will help set themselves up for the best possible performance. Identifying how you feel when you perform your best is the first step in managing your nervous energy. You wouldn’t want to decrease your nerves to the point that you don’t care about the competition, or increase your nervous energy to the point you get distracted and jittery. Finding your optimal balance is the key.

David Bellinger is a contributing blogger at Gymnastike (a gymnastics mirror to FloSwimming). You can find more of his articles HERE. Also check out related sport psychology content here on Kast-A-Way Blog.

USA Diving Communications Intern, Kelly Capehart, wrote a great article for USADiving.org about divers’ superstitions and rituals (link). The article includes comments from Olympians Mary Beth Dunnichay, Kelci Bryant, David Boudia, and Thomas Finchum, about their thoughts on rituals and some of the things they do to focus before a meet.

Divers are no exception to the many accounts of superstitions and rituals seen throughout sports, and these rituals vary even among divers. As Kelly reported, “Rituals certainly do vary from diver to diver, wavering between the mundane and the slightly more unusual.” However, she goes on to say that there is a distinction between superstitions and what can be thought of as simply a ritual focusing technique.

In an interview, Olympic coach John Wingfield of the National Training Center in Indianapolis told Kelly that routine can not only help you get into the zone for competition, but it can help to keep you there. You can hear all of Wingfield’s comments on the YouTube video now appearing on the USA Diving YouTube channel. Here is another clip that can be found on the USA Diving channel: it’s Olympian Kelci Bryant talking about her pre-meet rituals.

Of course my favorite parts of the article are the quotes from a former college diver (and current blogger):

Eric Teske, who dove for five years at Miami ( Ohio) University and plans to return to Masters diving, explained that “I have to dry myself off completely before I dive. It started off as a way to make sure I didn’t slip out of my tucks, but it’s really evolved into an obsession.”

But most athletes—cynics and believers alike—can agree that the benefits of a pre-dive ritual are the consistency they provide during high-stress moments. “There is a lot to be said for the use of a ritual or pre-game routine to help an athlete get in the right mind-set,” said Teske. “For example, a ritual of closing your eyes and visualizing the dive could be very beneficial.”