Racecar Drivers, Energy Management & Mental Performance
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: Racecar Drivers, Energy Management & Mental Performance
The field of sport psychology has a strong presence in many sports. For instance, every NFL team, power 5 athletic department and MLB team has at least several sport psychologists and mental performance consultants. But one area where sport psychology is just beginning to make in-roads is in motorsports. While we are now starting to see many of the most elite teams in all of the racecar series consult with sport psychologists, we still need significant growth in adding these professionals to race teams. I have been fortunate to be amongst those professionals in the sport psychology industry that works with elite motorsport athletes, and I have learned a great deal from the drivers, all the way to the pit crew about what sport psychologists should focus on to truly help these performers reach their peak potential.
In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I discuss many of these lessons I learned through a case study of a driver I worked with many years ago. While a significant portion of the book focuses on sports-related trauma and how it affects the brain, I also spend some time towards the end of the book discussing different strategies drivers can use to enhance their race performances (athletes from all sports populations can use these skills). Specifically, I focus on the importance of energy management and how one can become a master over this area of their training. For this issue of the Notes I will review the unique features of racecar driving, how energy management affects performances, and the science that both explains and informs best sport psychology practices in motorsports using energy management strategies.
Part I. Mental Energy Demands Of Racecar Drivers
I have discussed motorsport performance demands in great length in previous Training Reports, but the physical and psychological demands of racecar drivers are as intense as any sport. Depending on the series, racecar drivers can reach speeds between 200 to 360 miles per hour, pull anywhere from 3 to 4 Gs’ on the track, experience cockpit temperatures that reach up to 140 degrees, may need to apply up 350 lbs. of force on the brakes multiple times throughout the race, and will also need to monitor the changing conditions of the car throughout the race in order to make the necessary adjustments when getting back on pit road. As one can imagine, having to deal with all of this simultaneously can be incredibly energy demanding. In fact, these performances can be so intense, that many drivers on average will burn anywhere from 3000 up to 6500 calories in one race. All of this makes it easy to understand WHY drivers need to be masters of energy management.
Traditionally, sport psychologists would never focus on discussing energy management with athletes, let alone racecar drivers. But as previously mentioned, the field is rapidly evolving and many of the up and coming mental performance consultants and sport psychologists are enhancing their understanding of the connection between mental performance and energy management. Traditional sport psychology utilizes what are referred to as ‘top-down’ approaches, meaning that they try to help athletes develop better insight into issues around focus and mental blocks. But this approach does not effectively work when we are trying to help drivers enhance their energy management skills. That is why modern day sport psychology has begun to utilize interventions that are more ‘bottom-up’ focused, while simultaneously making sure that their approaches are grounded in exercise-psychology. Let’s discuss this further in part II.
Part II. The Science Of Energy Management & Sport Psychology
Sports are designed to be stressful environments. Overtime, the longer the athlete competes in the stress environment of sports, the more energy this will extract from them. And the more energy this extracts from athletes, the worse their decision making becomes. Ultimately, these negative consequences are the result of poor psychological functioning, but there are markers that we can identify before this decline ever happens. For instance, if you are a NASCAR driver and your HRV is not in a good state, your mental focus will be compromised and you will have a lot of disappointing performances. This is because research shows us that biomarkers such as HRV (Heart Rate Variability) are associated with different physical and mental states. When discussing HRV from a sport psychology perspective, we tend to focus on the larger impact that the autonomic nervous system has on an athlete’s mental performance (as well as their physical health). When we look at the premier research on the importance of HRV and the autonomic nervous system, Dr. Stephen Porges, one of the more well-known experts within the field has made groundbreaking discoveries and provided excellent descriptions about how this system works in relation to psychological reactions.
Per his website, the following quote illustrates important characteristics of this system, “The mind and body are connected through the Vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the autonomic nervous system, stretching from the brainstem to the colon. It is our internal control center, allowing the brain to monitor and receive information about many of our bodily functions”. We know from research that if left unchecked, athletes and other individuals with low HRV have issues associated with mortality, myocardial infarction, coronary heart disease, and congestive heart failure. When sport psychologists help enhance HRV, HRV in this case is associated with improved autonomic nervous system balance. Research on athlete populations shows that when these benefits are gained, athlete sport performance outcomes improve while also reducing the risk of complex motor skills from being compromised. So, what are the best approaches to help athletes improve psychologically using exercise & sport psychology? I have found that using a combination of smart prehab-focused exercises, along with a regimented self-monitoring system that tracks HRV trends gives racecar drivers the best chance to achieve their goals. Let’s dive deeper into this in part III!
Part III. Using Exercise Psychology To Train Mental Energy
From an HRV tracking perspective, I have found that both regularly collecting HRV data from the driver’s monitoring devices (Polar, WHOOP, Garmin, COROS) while also having them fill out customized surveys exploring subjective data about their stress levels is an effective way to help them monitor their recovery patterns. Most exercise physiologists just collect HRV data and store it, but rarely dive deeper into what the data means. Part of the reason for this is because there is such a high turnover in exercise science staff in different sports teams that they never get enough time to both analyze data and set goals for what they want to analyze. Also, many members of the exercise science staff only have training in exercise physiology, but none in clinical psychology or psycho-physiology. Essentially, this data sits on a computer server and will most likely never be thoroughly studied. But in my experience, when regularly tracking the data in synchronization with subjective driver self-reporting on stress levels, on average I have been able to help drivers accurately stay recovered and maintain high energy levels before races. In terms 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 fine 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 increase 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 a professional racecar driver and your body is in pain or aching, 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 in the car (you will not be distracted by your body’s limitations). All of these topics are issues that I have written about in my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, where I describe actual case studies that will help provide readers with a point of reference for how they can use these strategies themselves to achieve their goals!
