Why Every Program Needs a Mental Strength Coach
By Ryan Sederquist
In this article, you will read about:
* What a mental strength coach is …
* The difference between the “build-it” and “fix it” model when it comes to applied sport psychology
* Basic understanding of the purpose and benefits of integrating a mental strength program
Introduction
Every coach desires consistent, high level performance for themselves, their athletes, and their team. Traditionally, addressing the physiological demands of sport through training, nutrition, and recovery has been viewed as sufficient. Ignored is the role mental strength plays in outcome - both in accessing whatever physiological gains or physical abilities exist and in meeting the myriad of emotional and mental demands an athlete faces in and out of competition. But if prevailing research indicates the mind as integral to unlocking and unleashing the body, why is mental strength training seen as secondary? If psychological demands are as prevalent and impactful as physiological demands are in the competition sphere, why aren’t all teams pushing to implement a mental strength program?
The short answer is that they shouldn’t. However, historical preconceptions, lack of knowledge about sport psychology’s impact and integration, or a perceived financial inability to hire trained professionals often hold up coaches and/or athletic directors. Like strength training programs, teams which decide to “make it happen,” and commit to its implementation reap the benefits and end up more regularly approaching that elusive “peak performance.”
Mental strength training isn’t meant to be a special potion. It’s a key component to satisfying a truly holistic, athlete-centered, people-first approach to coaching, teaching, and competing. Despite its centrality to athlete growth and success, most visitors to NTS may find the content in this series of articles to be brand new. They may realize they’ve misdefined many terms, such as ‘mental toughness.’ (No, it is not solely a measurement of your ability to “suck it up!”). Don’t feel bad! It’s never too late to start becoming an expert, and for coaches, there may be no more critical field to consider applying a growth mindset to. Consider the words of Olympic gold medalist Sanya Richards-Ross:
“I started working with my sport psychologist after the 2008 Olympics and I wish I would have started sooner. My sport psychologist helped me to be present in the moment. My sport psychologist helped me to overcome my negative thoughts.”
Let’s get started.
What is a mental strength coach?
Sport psychology is the study of the knowledge of mental training in sport. Applied sport psychology is the ability to teach mental training to others. The latter is notably separate from counseling psychology with athletes, a profession focused on educational and interventional approaches to mental health disorders. Dr. Brian Zuleger, professor of sport psychology at Adams State University (ASU), prefers the title “mental strength coach,” a hat he wears alongside his classroom duties for the historically dominant ASU men’s and women’s cross country and track and field programs. To date, ASU’s 64 national team titles ranks behind only Stanford, UCLA, and USC for total program national titles. All but 8 of those have come from the men’s and women’s cross country and track and field programs. The women's cross country program has won 18 NCAA team titles since becoming a DII program in 1992, a year in which the men’s squad famously tallied a perfect score (runners finishing 1,2,3,4,5) at the national championship meet.
Why does Zuleger prefer the title?
He prefers building over fixing … especially when it comes to individual athletes and widespread team culture.
The “Build it” model
Historically, a sport psychologist is seen as being summoned only when athletically gifted headcases needed fixing. When coaches reach their wits’ end with underperforming, anxiety-filled, unmotivated athletes, they throw up their hands and send the ‘mentally weak’ to a counselor, where, the athlete presumably sits on a couch and opens up their heart. This is known as the “fix-it” model.
The “build-it” model looks at things differently.
“The old school way was to break athletes down and build them back up. What we need to do is take them from where they are and build from there,” says Zuleger.
Consider the weight room and the strength and conditioning coach. Coaches don’t send only the weak athletes to the weight room. The whole team follows the weight program, administered by the expert - the strength and conditioning coach - and often the most successful athletes are those who invest in it the most. Zuleger seeks to equate the role of the mental strength coach in a similar manner. In other words, just as everyone can benefit from strength training, so too can everyone benefit from mental strength training.
Coaches might think mental skills are only for athletes. Turns out, coaches need to sharpen their mental skills as well. Research suggests their demonstration - modeling - of mental skills in the competitive arena (and in practice settings, too) directly impacts their athletes’ performance and acquisition of those mental skills. (Stay tuned for my release of a future article analyzing this further!).
Another key reason for the title is that it specifies his role: he is an educator first.
“It’s a proactive approach,” he says. “While I might meet with someone individually, it’s also just teaching in general to all the athletes - and coaches - basic core concepts about mental strength training that can help them improve.”
As an advocate for the profession as a whole - with the motivation being the well-being and more consistently realized potential of athletes and coaches - Zuleger seeks to promote the mental strength coach as a full-time role with a team in the same way a strength coach or athletic trainer is typically assigned.
“The profession is built when the mental strength coach is full-time with a team or an organization,” he says. “It is more beneficial because of the link between this role and education of the whole staff, the whole team.”
This integrated, program-wide approach ensures athletes receive similar messaging from all of the various voices they come in contact with. Those fundamental, core concepts about mental strength are coming from the coach as well as the trainer, the strength coach, and even other athletes. They are taught and practiced and eventually embedded into the very fabric of a team’s culture.
“It isn’t someone who comes in at the beginning of the year, gives a talk, and then leaves.”
Unfortunately, a “team bonding” activity at the fall training camp is what many coaches consider adequate in checking off the “sport psychology box” in their to-do list. Few, however, would consider pulling a similar strategy when it comes to their weight room plan. “All athletes go to the weight room to get stronger, regardless of ability. We don’t just send the weak ones there. In fact, the best athletes are in the weight room the most,” says Zuleger.
By branding the role as ‘mental strength coach,’ Zuleger aligns himself with other commonly employed staff members. “It’s a support staff role, just like a strength and condition coach or an athletic trainer,” says Zuleger on a recent Strength Running Podcast. “We’re a support staff to the coaches and the athletes. We need to be integrated in that system.”
Athletes make the connection. They think:
‘This is someone on the support staff …’
‘We don’t only visit them when we are having problems or a bad day ...’
‘They are people we utilize in the pursuit of excellence, regardless of our ability level, because of the services they offer ...’
It is interesting to note that not all that long ago, distance running powers such as Adams State would have scoffed at the idea of adding a full-time strength and conditioning coach. Strength and power training was unnecessary for endurance sports. Of course, when Nike Oregon Project athletes like Mo Farah and Galen Rupp start closing 10k’s in 50-51 seconds, we started paying closer attention to the Flotrack videos highlighting 150% body weight power cleans. Skiing has seen an even more rapid revolution when it comes to power and strength development. Teams are starting to realize a similar advantage to investing in mental training.
Why don’t we have a mental strength coach?
If the direct connection between mental strength and performance is so clear, why isn’t support from a mental strength coach common? The answer is multifaceted. First, most do not understand the process and techniques which compromise a common sport psychology session (Ferraro & Rush, 2000; Gardner, 2001).
“Historically, it was seen as a sports psychologist role coming from the counseling psychologist type mindset - you go to your office and you sit in the office and tell them about your problems, kind of thing,” Zuleger says, reiterating the misconception passed along from a generation of coaches born and bred in the post-World War II era.
The research backs this up - athletes view sport psychology as a “quiet office, divulging your innermost secrets and emotions.” (Ravizza, 1988; Gee, 2010). The same negative stigma attached to seeking mental health services in general society exists in the “next man-up” and “suck it up” mentality of the sporting domain. Coaches who perpetuate this by believing and professing to athletes that sport psychology is only for “problem athletes” make it more difficult to establish the profession as a performance enhancement strategy.
The “build-it” model, with its program-wide integration, seeks to resolve this by getting everyone on board. The uniform messaging leads to meaningful, beneficial education and services to athletes.
The next two barriers go together - lack of knowledge and lack of money. If this article seems to be suggesting every team should hire a full-time certified mental strength coach, the readers’ minds should be reframed to again relate this component of performance with weight training. Is it possible for a small program ski coach to research, learn about, practice, and implement different power and strength exercises to their athletes? Of course. The same can be said about mental strength training. In a way, it is essential for the coach to do, since their application of mental strength techniques has a direct effect on athlete’s performance and education, and because, as Dr. Rick McGuire states, “Sport psychology should be delivered to and through the coach.” (Next week we’ll dive into this more with “Mental Strength Training for Coaches Part 1,” which will also include additional links and resources to start your sport psychology learning)
OK, but how does a skier actually benefit from mental strength training and a mental strength coach?
In order to answer this question, let’s think about the demands being placed on a skier.
The myriad of physical demands a nordic skier has placed on them is constantly changing due to the evolutionary nature of the sport; a recent review of the literature can be found here. Training programs are consequently designed to address and prepare, to the best of the coach and athlete’s ability, for these demands. What’s the latest research on what that looks like? Here you go.
While Dr. Sandbakk and his Trondheim-based lab at NTNU have the physiological aspects covered better than anyone, they aren’t studying the other half of the equation (they can only do so much for us, right?). In reality, that other half might be ...well, more than half.
First of all, consider the following psychological demands athletes go through:
- Performing under pressure
- Handling setbacks/adversity
- Preparing for major competitions/championships
- Improving quality of training sessions
- Mental recovery
- Managing thoughts and emotions related to training and racing
- Improving communication skills and coach-athlete relationships
- Making championship decisions on and off the court
Second, (and perhaps more important), consider how the mind acts as the key capable of unlocking whatever physical capacity has been honed through the Sandbakkian (there is my word of the day) physical training to begin with. “The brain is the main limiting factor in endurance performance,” Zuleger states. “Yes, you have to be physically fit, but with that fitness, your ability to tap into that fitness is driven by your brain. We’ve got good research now to support that.”
Gee (2010), speaks to this further, hammering home the point that sport psychology is intended to help athletes compete as closely as possible to 100% of their theoretical potential as possible. Part of that comes by helping individuals control and minimize the negative effects associated with a number of common psychological impediments (anxiety, confidence, concentration, etc.) all of which directly affect performance. Consequently, the largest impact of sport psychology is seen when competitors are equally matched. When the absolute performance potential between two athletes is small, their relative performance - and thus, competition outcomes - might hang in the balance of how well they manage the mental demands being placed on them.
This reminds me of what Sadie Bjornsen said on a recent podcast. I’m paraphrasing, but when speaking of her brother, she alluded to the fact that on the men’s side of the World Cup, he often did not get the credit he deserved domestically because of a failure to recognize the difference in depth between the women's and men's fields. Essentially, finishing places of 30th and 88th (on the men’s side) did not necessarily indicate a monumental gap in performance potential.
One has to wonder what role and/or impact mental strength could have for skiers who yearn to be consistently in the top 30 or top 5. Perhaps it has less to do with putting on the Norwegian uniform and more to do with mimicking their mental strategies - and those employed by other consistent podium placers. After all, don’t they eat their proverbial Wheaties with a bowl and a spoon just like us? It makes you wonder what part of any performance gap is related to mental strength or mental skills in practice.
By beginning with the end in mind, mental strength coaches take the list of demands above, consider the mental skill required to realize success in those areas, and provide services in the following ways:
- Mental preparation for competition
- Creating an optimal training environment
- Excelling under pressure
- Effective self-talk
- Concentration
- Visualization (Imagery)
- Confidence
- Recovery
- General life stress and well-being
- Coach-athlete relationships
- Communication (coach and training group)
- Mental training for injury rehabilitation
Be sure to check back this November and December as we release other mental strength related content: