Sport Psychology Tactics - What Are The Twisties In Gymnastics?
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: How Sport Psychologists Understand The Twisties Phenomenon
Most people think of sports as positive experiences that athletes use to learn more about themselves and how to deal with their environment on both a performance and personal level. Unfortunately, most people do not reflexively associate the connection between sports and psychological trauma. But when we further examine all of the stresses that athletes go through during sports in addition to how the brain operates in stressful environments, it becomes much easier to understand how many athletes sustain psychologically traumatic experiences in competition. One common stress point that many athletes experience are mental blocks during sport performance. There are many different labels for sports mental blocks, but one that people are becoming familiar with is the Twisties.
The Twisties is a type of mental block that occurs for gymnasts during competition. Most people have heard about the Twisties in terms of how the media has tried to conceptualize the experiences of famous athletes such as Simone Biles. Unfortunately, the media has largely failed at correctly explaining what this psychological phenomenon is and what causes it. Because this is such a common issue for gymnasts and athletes in different sports, I want to use this issue of the Training Report to review the Twisties in depth. In part one I will discuss how gymnastics athletes describe the feeling of the Twisties, in part two I will discuss the neuroscience of the Twisties, and in part three I will review a popular intervention that some sport psychologists claim can potentially help ‘cure’ the Twisties.
Part I. What Do The Twisties Feel Like?
No one can with 100% certainty tell you what the Twisties feels like. However, there are common descriptions that many of us relate to when Gymnastics athletes describe the experience of the Twisties. They will state that they experience some of the following symptoms: temperature change in their forehead and/or body (feeling intense heat or cold in different areas of the body unexpectedly), muscle tension in abnormal places such as the neck, arms or legs, feeling a pit in one’s stomach, feeling an increase in heart rate, rapid breathing, inability to keep eyes focused on a target or hyper-focusing on a specific spot, feeling as if one is ‘outside’ of their body, or losing complete awareness of one’s surroundings. So how do these things specifically affect gymnastics performances?
Many gymnastics athletes will either be unable to complete either simple movements or will stop performing the movements all together right in the middle of a performance even though there may be no presence of an injury or range of motion issues. Gymnastics athletes will describe no longer being able to do a tuck or tumble, and will often describe ‘freezing’ right before they are about to execute a movement or bailing in the middle of what they are doing. When coaches and the athlete’s support system see this they immediately label this the Twisties. But the truth is that the Twisties are NOT the core problem but rather a symptom of a deeper issue. That deeper issue is unprocessed trauma.
Part II. What Are The Twisties?
Sometimes gymnasts and athletes in other sports will hear coaches and even some sport psychologists say ‘it’s all in your head’. The underlying implication is that what you are thinking and feeling from a Twisties perspective is not ‘reality-based’ and this is just a part of your imagination. These coaches are actually right about the Twisties being ‘in your head’, but they are right for the wrong reasons…which is vitally important to understand. So what exactly is happening in a gymnast’s head that generates the Twisties? In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk goes even deeper explaining how the mechanisms of the brain respond to stress, which in turn create the symptoms of the Twisties (AKA symptoms of unprocessed trauma): the emotional brain has first dibs on interpreting incoming information. Sensory information about the environment and body state received by the eyes, ears, touch, kinesthetic sense, etc. converges on the thalamus where it is processed and then passed on to the amygdala to interpret its emotional significance. This occurs with lightning speed. If a threat is detected, the amygdala sends messages to the hypothalamus to secrete stress hormones to defend against that threat. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this the low road. The second neural pathway, the high road, runs from the thalamus via the hippocampus and anterior cingulate, to the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain, for a conscious and much more refined interpretation. This takes several microseconds longer. If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency response, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts.
While Dr. Van Der Kolk’s book provides an excellent description of the neuroscience behind the Twisties, we need a deeper understanding of what this looks like in a sport context. In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into detail explaining what happens in the brain that causes the twisties. Per the author ‘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.’ So now that we have a better grasp about what is happening in our brain when we are dealing with the Twisties, let’s explore one of my favorite interventions that can be used to overcome this: Brainspotting.
Part III. How To Fix The Twisties With Sport Psychology & Brainspotting
Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy technique that utilizes the client’s field of vision to identify unresolved psychological issues. 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. Brainspotting can be used to help anyone who is dealing with mental blocks, the Twisties, the yips, psychologically traumatic events, chronic pain issues from injuries, as well as individuals who are trying to access deeper levels of creativity or cultivating mental flow states. When we think about the potential issues that gymnastics athletes deal with that are connected to the Twisties (sport humiliations, sports-injuries, out of sport trauma such as car accidents, interpersonal relationship issues), it can be easy to see why this intervention pair perfectly with this athlete population.
The goal of all psychotherapy interventions are to help clients move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance if you are a gymnast and you have been experiencing the Twisties coming in the form of freezing before a tuck, this can be considered a state of dysregulation. Because almost half of the brain is dedicated to vision, we use the client’s field of vision combined with focused mindfulness to help engage the regions of the brain that are responsible for regulation and bypass the regions that are not! This physiological approach can help clients achieve their desired psychological outcomes. When athletes work with a sport psychologist who uses Brainspotting, they will first identify what the issue is that they would like to resolve. These issues can range from experiencing pre-performance nerves in sports, to having anxiety about speaking in front of a team. Clients discuss the issue in-depth and then the sport psychologist invites clients to have their eyes follow a pointer that the clinician will move in certain directions to identify the eye position that is relevant to the topic that the client is looking to resolve. Once the eye position is identified, the client will hold that eye position for either several minutes up to two hours potentially until the issue is resolved. Whether gymnasts like it or not, the Twisties is an inevitable part of gymnastics for many athletes. In the same way athletes need to condition themselves to deal with predictable features of sport performance (e.g. working with a strength coach to increase power), Brainspotting is a form of mental training that will help you either avoid or work through the Twisties!
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!
