Right now is one of those super-charged, exciting periods for sports fans. If your television spends most of its time on channels like ESPN, Fox Sports and channels of the sort, you may be having a hard time pulling yourself away from it these days. The Euro Cup just concluded, the Le Tour De France is in progress, the Wimbledon is winding down, and the US Olympic time trials were recently the hype as we move rapidly towards the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games. Truly, there is a constant energy of some sort in the air right now, if you are a sports fan of any sort. With so many tournaments running so closely to each other, the significance of these events can be better appreciated, as we are forced to constantly consider the level of training and discipline that is required to compete at these elite levels. Fans begin to appreciate that athletes at these levels are more than just athletes but products of tremendous investment, in a great many number of ways. The journey of an athlete to elite competition is filled with tremendous levels of investment in the form of time, energy, money, research, equipment, competition and experience, coaching and training, etc. and absolutely none of it can be compromised, a fact that Trinidad and Tobago continues to refuse to recognize and so we continue to cut corners and push selfish agendas but anyway…
The aspect of elite competition that always impresses me most whenever I look at one of these major tournaments, even more than the physical beauty and prowess of these epitomes of human ability, is the psychological wherewithal these astounding individuals display in dealing with the responsibility of having achieved all that they have to that moment in time. I deliberately use the word “responsibility” for those athletes know that the entire world is looking at them and that every decision they make can and will affect everything that they have and will continue to work very hard towards until they retire, and maybe even thereafter. The stresses placed on the body to become an athlete at the elite levels are extreme. The hours of training to improve the various components of athleticism such as agility, speed, explosiveness, quickness, strength, endurance, etc. are all very carefully calculated and accomplished with significant hours of training and careful nourishing and rejuvenating. It is not until you look at their faces prior to and during their execution that you begin to appreciate the level of training that has gone on mentally, allowing them that edge above their opponents to earn their current position. Always before the actual race is run or the game begins, the cameras provide coverage of the athlete(s), observing them in the tunnels or behind the blocks. The picture zones in on the athlete’s facial expression but particularly on the eyes, always the eyes because as we all know, those are what usually reveal what is on our mind or in our heart. In those pictures, I always wonder what is going through that athlete’s mind. What techniques are they applying to keep their mind and body connected to ensure that their performance is exactly where it needs to be to win first place.
Technology exists allowing us to measure and identify various levels and types of brainwaves that we produce in our different states of being. Technology has also created ways to train the brain to deliberately move to mental states of being and awareness. The Alpha Brainwave frequency has been associated with “peak performance” and therefore is the mental state that elite athletes move toward when they are about to compete. The amateur or recreational athlete will more likely produce the beta brainwaves of nervousness and anxiety due to their inability to deliberately control their minds. We humans can begin to train ourselves to tap into these mental strengths at any point in our lives. We just need to have the desire to develop them, a beautiful and amazing strength that we possess however, the earlier we start developing these skills the better we become at exercising it. Hence, athletic talent is identified as early as possible – not just to be able to mold the individual physically but mentally as well and this is the elementary mistake that is often made by coaches and parents. Novices and short-sighted individuals forget that the thing that separates the gold medalist from the silver medalist, the athlete who makes the cut from the athlete who got drop is not always because the one athlete outperformed the other but that the one athlete performed better and smarter. The only way you can perform at your best to keep your purpose in mind and your strategy clear is to not be distracted by external factors such as fear of the possibility of failing, of not meeting expectations, of injury, of being outdone by an opponent or the distracting roar of the crowd, the presence of tv cameras, of screaming fans reaching their hands to touch you, of gaining/losing a contract.
The best are able to focus clearly on their purpose and do what is needed to accomplish the task at hand. This mental discipline is applied not only on the day of competition but every single moment of every day until the goal is achieved. Parents, coaches, athletes, do not fool yourselves into thinking that acquiring the mental skills to become a winner can be self-taught and achieved quickly and easily. The ordinary, intelligent human being can get it through books and experiences but the elite athlete does not have that luxury of time nor the room to guess where their mental state is. Deliberate action is needed in order to take the mind to the state needed for competition and the precision with which this is done is what will carry that performance from great to excellent - to perfection!
-Asha De Freitas-Moseley
Source: www.guardian.co.tt