Mental Health Performance - Strategies Sport Psychologists Use To Help Athletes Overcome Injuries
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: Sport Psychologists, Athletes & Mental Training For Sport-related Injuries
I have written extensively about both the positive and negative experiences that come with sports participation. Regardless of whether or not these experiences are good or bad, the research is clear that mental training is an integral part towards helping an athlete develop into the type of performer they want to be. One area where mental training is critical is helping athletes with a common negative experience that almost all of them go through: incurring a sport-related injury. I have talked about these issues in previous Training Reports, but I want to take a different approach for this report.
I am going to use this issue to discuss specific mental strategies that athletes can use to mentally train through a sport-related injury. First, I am going to review the strategy of mental toughness and how athletes can develop this. Next I will review advanced strategies that sport psychologists use to help athletes access their entire brain to deal with injuries. Finally, I will review how athletes can take these skills and use periodization strategies to make sure that they mentally train through and injuries and excel in peak mental performance when competition season arrives. Let’s first begin by exploring mental toughness.
Part I. How Sport Psychologists Help Athletes Develop Mental Toughness For Injuries
The term ‘mental toughness’ gets thrown around a lot by athletes, coaches & sport psychologists. Oftentimes when most people hear this term, the first interpretation that comes to mind for most people is an athlete’s ability to not let emotions affect them so they can continue to perform. There is some romanticized idea that athletes should possess a stoic disposition throughout a stressful process. It goes without saying, that there are most certainly times when athletes need to put on a ‘brave face’ but not everything is a nail, and not everything can be solved with a hammer. When most performers think of mental toughness they reflexively think that this is how they need to be in all parts of their lives. But sport psychology and trauma research has actually taught us otherwise.
Sports injuries have a unique effect on the brain and body as opposed to other obstacles in sports. Dysregulation behaviors and involuntary responses produced by our subcortical brain do not respond to well to emotional suppression or insight-based sport psychology skills such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind sports-related injuries and how they affect the brain: 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.’
This explanation should help clarify why traditional methods in sport psychology will not be effective for every issue in sports, especially when we are talking about the psychological effects sports-related injuries can have on the brain. If we are going to use mental toughness as an approach to help athletes through injuries, we need to understand that there are a wide range of ways one can teach mental toughness to athletes. Experts such as AASP Certified Mental Performance Consultants (CMPC) and sport psychologists have an opportunity to shift the narrative amongst coaches and athletes by explaining that mental toughness can also mean fully exploring one’s emotions. When athletes go through injuries, they will inevitably undergo an intense range of emotions ranging from the lows of being removed from their sport, to the highs of making progress in their recovery. But probably the most important time to be mentally tough for an athlete, is just after they have sustained the injury. Making sure they take the time to both emotionally and somatically process the experience will be key for them to move forward from the injury. In my professional opinion, that is elite mental toughness training. I have talked about this extensively in previous Training Reports, but I want to go a little deeper into WHY this is the case.
Part II. Advanced Mental Training Athletes Use To Access Their Whole Brain During Injury Rehabilitation
When athletes go to work with orthopedic surgeons or physical therapists, there is an exclusive focus on the physical aspect of the injury, meaning that all activities towards rehabilitation are physical in nature. The athlete will experience the injury, go to a sports medicine team for rehab and then return to training and competition. There is almost no discussion about how to address the psychological component of the injury. In fairness to these professionals, understanding the brain science that I previously discussed is not a main point of focus in their training. But with some statistical certainty, we can safely predict that they will only focus on the body and not the mind-body connection. So with that being said, what are some forms of somatic / trauma-informed approaches athletes can use to mentally train through these issues, knowing that they will most likely not get this help from sports-medicine professionals?
I have spent a considerable amount of time talking about the importance of deep breath work, but I believe that during rehabilitation athletes should be regularly engaged in deep breathing exercises to facilitate the process of retraining their autonomic nervous system to be in more of a parasympathetic state. After athletes sustain an injury, there is a strong chance that athletes will be in a higher sympathetic nervous system state. As previously mentioned, this is because the body’s alarm systems are involuntarily activated as a way to protect the athlete. When athletes are in a higher sympathetic nervous system state, their muscles are usually more tense which makes rehabilitation more difficult. This explains why sport psychologists that are working with athletes on their mental training need to spend considerable time trying to retrain their body to relax. The deep breath work will actually help speed up recovery and bring back the athlete to their normal baseline. Let’s explore HOW athletes can implement this training into their regimen.
Part III. How Athletes Can Use Periodization In Their Mental Training To Peak For Competition
When athletes undergo mental training, they cannot just focus on using ‘positive affirmations’ or training ‘positive self-talk’. Using the methods of deep breathing or somatic approaches, coaches and sport psychologists can coordinate with one another to develop an integrated approach using strength & conditioning periodization strategies to help athletes mentally train through their injuries. In my opinion, this would look like a combination of athletes working with a sport psychologist that uses trauma-informed interventions such as EMDR, Brainspotting, or Somatic therapy which targets the actual injury trauma event (Athletes would also simultaneously engage in deep breath work both during rehabilitation and outside of physical training).
Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialists (CSCS) understand that when athletes are undergoing rigorous exercise, they have to design training cycles based on the sport seasons (off-season, pre-season, regular season, post-season). Different times of the competition season require different levels of intensity. As such, the way mental training is periodized will depend on both when the athlete was injured and how severe the injury is. If an athlete has an injury that can be significantly repaired before a competition, sport psychologists will need to increase the frequency and intensity of the mental training interventions. If an athlete has an injury where there is a significant time gap until they compete, sport psychologists can help the athlete pace themselves on mental training so they do not ‘burn out’ the athlete. However athletes choose to work through this issue, they need to make sure that the mental training is somatic in nature and time sensitive to competition!
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!
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