Top 3 Sport Psychology Skills
About the Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns 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: The Top 3 Sport Psychology Skills
As athletes look to gain the edge over their competition, they will use any tools necessary to achieve their goals. One resource that athletes have been turning to more and more is sport psychology. Athletes and coaches are beginning to recognize that all athletes use exercise science strategies to improve their training outcomes, but very few use sport psychology. Predictably, many collegiate and professional sports teams have begun to employ Certified Mental Performance Consultants and sport psychologists to help their athletes gain a competitive advantage.
However just in the same way athletes look towards sport psychology to differentiate their training from their peers, many sport psychologists try to find different mental training methods that will separate them from their sport psychology colleagues. Through this process, there appear to be three distinct sport psychology skills that athletes can count on to give them the best results: Brainspotting/EMDR, Biofeedback/neurofeedback and exercise psychology. For this issue of the Notes, I want to briefly introduce each skill that influenced my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns.
Part I. Brainspotting Mental Skills Training
In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process athletes 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 athletes being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue (which we refer to as a Brain Spot) that has created conflict, which then enables athletes to move from needing to constantly cope with things like negative thinking, to not needing to cope at all. Brainspotting can be used to help anyone who is dealing with mental blocks, the Yips, the Twisties, 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 athletes deal with that are connected to the mental blocks (sport humiliations, sports-injuries, out of sport trauma such as car accidents, interpersonal relationship issues), it can be easy to see why this intervention pairs perfectly with this athlete population.
The goal of all sport psychology interventions should be to help athletes move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance, if you are a golfer and you have been experiencing the Yips, this can be considered a state of dysregulation. Because almost half of the brain is dedicated to vision, we use the athlete’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. Athletes discuss the issue in-depth and then the sport psychologist invites athletes 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 athlete is looking to resolve. Once the eye position is identified, the athlete will hold that eye position for either several minutes up to two hours potentially until the issue is resolved.
Part II. Athlete Biofeedback & Neurofeedback
Biofeedback is a technique by which sport psychologists monitor and display what is happening in the athlete’s body from a physiological perspective. There are several different traits that sport psychologists and mental performance consultants can focus on in order to help the athlete with this technology. In the book Biofeedback & Neurofeedback Applications In Sport Psychology edited by Benjamin Strack, PhD, Michael Linden, PhD & Vietta Wilson, PhD, the authors give examples of where Biofeedback technology is used.
Heart Rate: Elevated heart rate may increase reaction time, while stabilization of heart rate may increase endurance, and cardiovascular efficiency.
Respiration - Improper respiration may lead to performance inefficiency or ‘choking’ and hyperventilation.
Muscular Tension - Excess muscle tension can inhibit movement speed, rhythm, timing & flexibility.
Sweaty Palms - An indirect measure of emotional reactivity and anxiety
Brainwave Activity - Athletes who learn to control brainwaves can enhance their ability to pay attention, control their emotions, and minimize a busy brain.
Peripheral Body Temperature - Measures blood flow or blood-vessel constriction in the hands and feet. Stress can cause the constriction or shutting down of blood flow, which inhibits recovery from strenuous workouts or minor and major injuries.
Neurofeedback is a noninvasive, neuroscience intervention which measures & trains brainwaves. This approach provides real-time feedback about where the athlete’s brain is functioning efficiently versus where their brain needs training. Ultimately, this mind-body approach can help athletes develop neural stability which leads to an increased stress-threshold tolerance. When beginning neurofeedback training, brain mapping technology (aka QEEG) is first used to analyze how different areas of an individual’s brain are functioning & interacting with one another. Once an athlete’s brain has been analyzed, we use the information from the QEEG to start neurofeedback interventions tailored to the athlete’s individual needs. This intervention works through Operant Conditioning, which is a form of learning that uses a reward to modify behavior. For example, during a neurofeedback session as the brainwaves change in a healthier way, you may hear a bell ring or you will see a visual image changing on a computer screen . This feedback encourages the brain to more easily move into healthier functional ranges over time.
Part III. Exercise Psychology
Exercise psychology is mostly used to help individuals identify ways of staying motivated so they can improve healthcare outcomes. But I have found that there are more creative ways to use exercise psychology to help athletes improve their mental training. One form of exercise psychology that I employ with my athletes is through the use of Prehab. There are many different definitions and interpretations of what ‘prehab’ is. In the book The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferris, the author quite simply defines prehab as ‘injury-proofing- the body. You could make the argument that all strength & conditioning is ‘injury-proofing’ the body, but when speaking with different exercise science professionals and biomechanists, most of these individuals consider prehab to be a combination of strength training with physical-therapy style focused exercises. In Mr. Ferris’s book, he provides an example of how prehab specialists think about this issue: According to Gray the most likely cause of injury is neither weakness nor tightness, but imbalance. Think doing crunches or isolated ab work is enough to work your core muscles? Think again. ‘The core, as just one example, often works find as long as one’s hips aren’t moving. It’s when the hips are moving-a more realistic scenario-that the core starts to compensate for left-right differences.’ That’s when you get injured.
Other experts in the field provide similar content to support the need to focus on these types of interventions. In the book Becoming A Supple Leopard by Dr. Kelly Starrett, the following excerpt provides additional rational for this type of thinking: Prioritizing spinal mechanics is the first and most important step in rebuilding and ingraining functional motor patterns, optimizing movement efficiency, maximizing force production, and avoiding injury. In order to safely and effectively transmit force through your core and into your extremities, you need to organize your spine in a neutral position and then crease stability throughout that organized system by engaging the musculature of your trunk, which is knowns as bracing. This is the basis of midline stabilization and organization. To oversimplify this, if you are an athlete and your body is in pain, aching or your HRV is not in a good state, your mental focus will be compromised and you will have a lot of disappointing performances. Selecting physical training approaches that are both ‘mental specific’ and ‘sport specific’ will enhance psychological performance outcomes during sports performances.
