Sports Psychologists and Olympic Athletes
The physical training athletes constantly work at can only get them so far when the big moment comes. The body can always be trained and improved, and when the competitive sh*t is hitting the fan, an athlete’s body will have been so intensively trained that the muscles will tend to react according to the memories the muscles have stored up based on that training.
All of which should mean that if an athlete can see what’s happening during a competition and can let their minds go enough to allow their muscle-memoried bodies to do what they’ve been trained to do, everything should be golden. Too bad athletes are using their bodies so extensively that their amped-up minds have time to think and think until mentally the athlete is curled up in a corner, twitching and terrified, certain of failure at the critical moment.
In the old days, the coach gave the athlete a pep talk, a good whack on the back, and told the athlete to suck it up and take it like a man. These days, there are sports psychologists. When an athlete is physically flawless, but tends to mentally crumple when confronted with the pivotal moment of doom, a sports psychologist becomes part of his/her training team.
An article in the CS Monitor explains the ins and outs:
German biathlete Magdalena Neuner came into the Vancouver Olympics with six world championship titles in her pocket — but a history of wildly inconsistent shooting that has also left her with some poor results.
So when the young stand-out won her first of three medals so far at these Olympics — including two of Germany’s six gold medals — she had a simple answer for how she had become so much more consistent this year.
“I worked very hard, especially in the mental training,” she said, a concept she elaborated on later. “One has to understand that physical fitness alone isn’t sufficient. My mental training is very complex and it makes me believe in myself…. To control your mind is more difficult than to control your body.”
Posted by Alexa Harrington
Olympic athletes are under more pressure than ever before to elevate their performance. The bar has been raised so high for today’s athletes that it almost takes the focus of a machine rather than a human. This is the reason sports psychologists have become an integral part of an athletes training. Mental training is just as important as physical training. It is demanding and takes commitment. I admire both the Olympic athlete as well as the men and women who train them.