Mental Health Performance - Football Athletes, Sport Injuries & Muscle Guarding: Understanding The Connection To Trauma
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: Unraveling The Truth Behind Muscle Guarding, Sports Injuries & Football Athletes
In sports, it is widely recognized that it is not a matter of IF athletes get injured, but when. There is an entire industry of sports medicine professionals immediately available to help athletes that have sustained sport-related injuries. While there are many excellent professionals within this space, there is a large misunderstanding about the psychological impact that sports-related injuries will have on athletes. This is not necessarily the fault of sports medicine professionals but surprisingly due to the lack of understanding that sport psychologists have about this topic. One specific issue that athletes commonly report is muscle guarding.
Because this is such a common issue in my practice, I want to take the time to discuss the connection between muscle guarding and athlete mental health performance, but specifically in the American Football population. In part I. we will establish what muscle guarding looks like during and after the rehabilitation process. In part II. we will review the neuropsychology behind muscle guarding and how this connects to PTSD. Finally we will review interventions in part III. that give athletes the best chance at overcoming this issue and returning to their baseline of performance. Let’s first begin by looking at how American Football players report experiencing this issue.
Part I. Understanding The Connection Between Sport-Related Injuries & Muscle Guarding
When athletes experience injuries in sports, society at large tends to view these experiences as physical and not psychological in nature. For instance, if an athlete tears their ACL they will undergo surgery and then a months-long process of physical therapy and rehabilitation. During this process athletes will report experiencing pain and will often complain of muscle tension throughout the process. This is seen as normal and a natural function of the body going through the sports medicine recovery program.
However, when athletes ‘complete’ physical therapy and still report symptoms of muscle guarding or pain in the location of the injury, many sports medicine professionals will view this problem as ‘psychological’ and will even tell athletes that it’s ‘just in your head’. There is an underlying presumption that sports injuries are separate from psychological issues, and that sports injuries in no way could be considered traumatic in nature because sports are not placed in the same category of car accidents or other experiences. Let’s dive into why this is a mistake.
Part II. Why Muscle Guarding From Injuries Can Be An Athlete Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Response
When we look at the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders (DSM), a key section of the manual describing diagnostic features of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) states the following: A life-threatening illness or debilitating medical condition is not necessarily considered a traumatic event. Medical incidents that qualify as traumatic events involve sudden, catastrophic events (e.g., waking during surgery, anaphylactic shock). Yet when athletes undergo sports-related injury they will commonly report symptoms of recurrent, involuntary and intrusive distressing memories of the injury, recurrent distressing dreams, dissociative reactions, intense or prolonged psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic events, or report marked physiological reactions to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic events. All of these symptoms are diagnostic criteria that are listed in the DSM. So why is there such a hesitation amongst sport psychologists and sports medicine professionals to label these behaviors as PTSD responses? Shockingly it is because very few of these individuals have even minimal training or education on the basic functions of how the brain responds to stressful events. This has resulted in most psychotherapy being rooted in modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing, which are the incorrect tools to deal with issues of prolonged muscle guarding responses. So let’s briefly explore what actually happens in the brain during a stress event that generates a psychological trauma-based response.
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind PTSD and how this is connected to sports-related trauma. The author describes as follows ‘In parallel fashion, the brain attempts to always move toward a state of psychological equilibrium. Over the course of our lives, we are exposed to a variety of life experiences, some positive, some neutral, and some negative. Through a natural assimilation process, the brain adaptively processes these experiences so they are constructively integrated. What is useful from the experience is learned and stored in the brain with the appropriate emotion and is available for future use. When an experience is successfully assimilated or digested it is stored in the brain with little attached intense emotion or physical sensation. When we recall such an incident, we don’t reexperience the old emotion or sensation with it. In this way we are informed by our past experiences and memories but not controlled by them and with sports our present athletic performances are not burdened by emotional or physical baggage from the past, only learned experience. By contrast, trauma or any strongly negatively charged experience isn’t adequately assimilated or processed. Instead, the upsetting incident remains stuck in the system in broken pieces’.
The author continues, ‘ The body instantly memorizes the physical experience of the trauma in exquisite detail, including the body sensations of the impact and pain, along with the associated sights, sounds, smells and tastes. The attached emotions and where they are felt in the body are frozen as well. The brain is overwhelmed and instead of getting digested, all of the information attached to the injury, including the negative thoughts is stored in the brain in exactly the same form it was initially experienced. Days, week, months or even years later when the athlete is in a situation reminiscent of the original trauma or experiences prolonged stress, the upsetting experience may be unconsciously activated, thus interfering with the performance of the moment. These components represent all of the sensory details from the earlier event that were frozen in the brain and body in their original disturbing state: the images, lighting, emotions, physical movements, sounds, or smells. The unique sensory details later returning to consciousness cause the performance disrupting symptoms so common in mental blocks.’ When we understand what the brain goes through during a stress event like a sports-related injury, it becomes easier to understand why this is a traumatic event for athletes and how muscle guarding can be a PTSD response that keeps the athlete in a type of hypervigilant state. Let’s now explore a specific intervention that athletes can use to deal with muscle guarding: Brainspotting.
Part III. Why Sports Medicine Needs To Integrate Trauma-Informed Mental Health Interventions Into Rehab Process
There is a growing movement of sport psychologists that are starting to recognize the importance of using trauma-informed and somatic-based psychotherapy into their work with athletes. This is because there is a large body of evidence that is beginning to explain the neuroscience of PTSD and trauma responses and establishing why the previous mentioned therapies are the correct tools for these issues. One intervention that is gaining massive popularity amongst athletes and sport psychologists is Brainspotting. The sport psychology community is becoming more curious about this intervention because of both the success that Brainspotting is having in working with athlete populations and also because it is specifically tailored to deal with athlete PTSD. Developed in the late 1990s by Dr. David Grand, he discovered the technique while helping an Olympic ice skater overcome the Yips. Using what was known as EMDR, he noticed that during this protocol there were specific eye movement patterns that appeared to be associated with certain traumatic memories. So why is this important when we are talking about using this as a possible intervention?
In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process clients have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional psychotherapy approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy are unable to do. This results in clients being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue (which we refer to as a Brain Spot) that has created conflict allowing individuals to move from needing to constantly cope, to not needing to cope at all. Muscle guarding that continues during and after injury rehabilitation is the body’s way of communicating that there is still unprocessed trauma and cannot be ameliorated through traditional sport psychology coping methods. Brainspotting is still very new and has very little research behind it, which is a valid criticism of the intervention. But it is rooted in EMDR principles and its’ founder is an EMDR trainer. This is important because EMDR has a plethora of research that strongly supports its’ efficacy. Through my work with professionals in the sports performance space, I have had tremendous success helping athletes clear their symptoms of muscle guarding and PTSD using Brainspotting! If you would like to learn more, use this link!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
ARE YOU ON THE LIST?
Make sure you’re signed up to Ben’s mailing list to receive news & updates on new strategies in sport psychology, upcoming workshops & products. Don’t wait, sign up now!
Check Out The Previous Training Reports!
