Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Seventy-Four – Cycle of Performance – When is the right time to improve, to perform, or to recover?
Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who are looking to do their sport just a little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is your mental and performance conscience. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle. In this episode 74, we're going to look at when is the right time to improve, the right time to perform, and the right time to recover. So we're going to look at optimising skills and performance over a whole season and doing that the smartest way possible. One of the key skill sets, I think in my role as a mentor coach that is really critical is I need to see patterns a little bit.
Like that movie...
"I see dead people."
...only a lot less creepy.
So when I look at a whole season for an athlete, I tend to look at it as a big picture project, broken down into multiple different level patterns. What we can do to optimise, what parts of the pattern are higher demand than other areas, and where are our areas that we can grow and where sustainability comes from. So what we're going to do during this podcast is to look at a traditional season now, within your sport, and depending on what level you're at there's going to obviously be some idiosyncrasies here in comparison to other sports: are they summer sports; are they winter sports; are they short seasons; are they long seasons; are they impact sports or are they artistic sports? So of course there's going to be some areas that are not exactly the same. However, the principles and the philosophies can cross-platform across any kind of sport.
So if we look at a traditional cycle, we look at preseason. Now, traditionally, preseason is completely designed for fitness and skill acquisition. What we're looking to do in that traditional mode is get the body and the athlete ready, prime them for the season, making sure that their skills are adequate, making sure that their physical ability is going to be able to sustain the season for them.
Then we go into the start of the season and this is traditionally all about implementation, making sure you take what you've learnt in the preseason and applied it at the start of the season. So you want to come out strong, you want to come out forceful and in command and hard. The mid- to back-end of the season traditionally is holding on, hoping the preseason pays off, trying to maintain what you've got and what you've grown from the start of the season and not letting anything fall off.
So you want to get to the end of the season as a whole athlete not injured, not missing any skill sets, not missing any opportunities.
The post season is your opportunity for downtime. And often athletes tend to go and they hide. They get as far away as they can from their sport and the lifestyle they've just had throughout the season.
Does this sound familiar to you? Because it sounds quite logical, right? However, it could be the thing that's mentally stunting your growth and it's building a high degree of anxiety in you as an athlete. And the reason is it's completely fear-based. So let's look at it a little bit deeper.
Let's understand exactly what's going on, and look at it from a mental and emotional management perspective rather than just a physical or skill set development perspective. So let's look at the why preseason statistically has the highest degree and number of strain and tear injuries in athletes. And that's because you're going out there hard, you're trying to prepare. You've maybe just come off an off season where you've not done a great deal of preparation. You've not primed your body, and you've certainly slowed down from the last season. So we have an increase in muscle tears and muscle strains during this period of time. There's also an anxiety over what's going to be actually good enough. There's a higher degree of anxiety in preseason for most athletes. And you hear that in some of the language they're saying to you, "I can't wait for the season to start. I want to get out there. I want to get moving. Once I'm on the field/on the ice/in the pool/wherever it is, I know I'll be okay then." So for me, in my world, that indicates a high degree of anxiety, a high degree of the athlete being concerned about, But what if it's not good enough? This is a short term focus.
So then let's go into the actual start of the season, and the focus is often on, like I said before, coming out hard, coming out and being strong. And what that is, initially, is trying to prove a point. So they're trying to prove that there's 'selectability'. They're trying to prove they should be on the team, not on the bench. They're trying to prove that they've come back "better than I was last year". They need to stand out from a mental and emotional perspective. This isn't completely externally referenced, and there's a lot of, again, short term focus here, almost at the sacrifice of the rest of season, to make sure that people see you that way. That affects your selectability, selects your position within the club. It selects your ability to create sponsorship, and obviously your money that goes in your pocket at the end of the season. So if we know that the short term focus on coming out hard isn't actually going to give you what you're after, what's the alternative? We'll get back to that in a moment.
So look at the mid- to the back-end of the season. Often when you see athletes in this period of their career or at least that season's part of their career, a lot of it is this holding pattern. Like I said before, they want to make sure that what they've done in their preseason and the start of the season is maintained. So we have this mindset, this closed mindset of, "I hope nothing falls off, I hope nothing falls apart. Let me just maintain this." They've only got X amount of games or meets to go, so therefore it's a really holding on tight kind of mindset rather than any kind of growth mindset. Also, during this mid- to back-end of the season, we become hyper aware of threats, things that could derail us, injuries, potential deselection, all those kinds of things. So we become problem focused. We actually go and preemptively look for things that could go wrong. Now, welcome to the world. This makes you human. This is part of our normal innate mental processes. However, it's kind of counterproductive for elite and high end performance because we're no longer again looking for growth. We're looking to maintain. We're almost stunting and stopping any kind of movement, just in the fear of holding on tight or at least looking for any chinks in the armour that could get exposed throughout the season.
We're end step driven as athletes, we're looking for that result. We want to make sure that we win the Premiership, we want to make sure that we make it through the whole season and achieve our objectives, whatever they were at the start of the season. And we also gauge ourselves on, Do we get over that finishing line? So what we're doing is actually increasing the relevance and the importance in our brain of getting over that line. So we start to dive for the line. However, at what point do you dive for that line? Is it during the last game of the season where you kind of put everything on the line or is it the second from last? What makes the last one any more important than the second from last or the third from last or the fourth from last? You see what I mean here? When we get to that point where we're in a holding pattern, we're trying not to lose rather than trying to win. What we're actually doing is increasing the anxiety of our brain of what could go wrong, which makes us hyper aware of what could actually be a threat to us.
We'll start to notice more niggly injuries. The reality is a lot of those little niggly injuries have been there from the start of the season. We're just not focused on them at the start of the season. We're externally referenced at the start of the season. Our gauge is on our ability as a result and what other people think of us. Nearer the end of the season, we become a little bit more intrafocused and start to think,
Oh, I can feel that injury. I can feel this injury.
I'm a little bit sore when I get out of bed.
I'm maybe not as productive during the week's training before the game, on the weekend.
I can't actually complete as many reps as I was doing.
All of this takes what you trust in the back of your mind, brings it to the prefrontal cortex and we start to overthink it. So we start to look for those flaws in our ability, our preparation, our skill foundations, and we start to become anxious. So again, we start to reduce the amount of workload we do. We start to reduce the amount of reps we do in a hope that we're going to hold on until the end of the season.
So when we come to the end of the season and we've dived for the line, we've got over that, we've made it to the end, and there's that collective, "We made it!" Then all we want to do, we want to hide as an athlete. That was a tough season, that was a big season, that was a long season (with the preseason as well). You know, I'm going to go on holiday and rightly so you've earned that. We want to be very focused on achieving your objectives and rewarding them so we create momentum. However, if going on holiday is more about getting away and hiding, then you're not actually rewarding what you're actually doing mentally is saying, Wow, that was such hard work. I want to hide from that. So what we're doing is telling our brain that in actual fact is an undesirable place to be rather than a desirable place to be. Rather than being the athlete and enjoying what you do, you've now just increased the relevance to actually getting away from it. Don't get me wrong, it's important we have balance. And anybody who's listened to my podcast or see me work with athletes in the past know that I talk a lot about making sure we spin plates, making sure that we're always focused on every aspect of what we do.
And part of that, obviously, is balance and looking at the downtime as much as the uptime. So again, if we're not refreshed and regenerated, then we can't actually optimise our training and our performance. So the downtime is really critical to us. However, understanding the purpose, the reason behind the downtime and using it more as a reward rather than a place to go and hide actually shifts our ability to see training and season completely different. This cycle that many athletes follow the preseason, the start of the season, the mid to end of the season, and the end of the season, the postseason stuff. This cycle is actually from a mental and emotional perspective, completely unsustainable. It increases our fight or flight mindset, it increases our emotions, but not in a positive way, but in an anxiety, fear based way. And we are more likely to be looking for diving for the line, for that end step, getting over the end of just getting out of there rather than how we grow. So from my perspective in the world that I move in, where I look at sustainability, replicability and how we continually grow an athlete to be the best version of themselves, there are some things that we can currently do within this cycle to optimise to get more out of it and make it way more sustainable and realistically enjoyable for the athlete.
So let's go through that cycle again from a mental and emotional standpoint and look at it more solution based thinking rather than problem solving. We want to think about a plan, a smarter way to consistently and controllably grow. So preseason, yes, we focus on building and prepping us physically, making sure we're primed and ready to go. We want to make sure that physically we are capable of competing. So I completely and 100% agree with that. However, from a mental and emotional perspective, we want to make sure that it's just a primer for the big picture. A step in the process. We want to make sure that the end step of the season, our core objective is during preseason at focal point. The reason behind that is we want to make sure that every single day when we rock up and we prepare, we're not thinking, What could go wrong? So we're not saying to ourselves, Okay, I need to be physically prepared, I need to have these skill sets so that this doesn't go wrong. We're saying, Okay, I need to be physically prepared and I need to have these skill sets so that I can add to my steps towards X.
So we're way more growth orientated rather than away-from orientated. We want to make sure that we're growing towards something, that we want the action steps we need to take to get there rather than being highly focused on, 'I don't want to not be good enough' or 'I don't want to not be fit enough at the start of the season. I want to make sure that everything I'm doing now is just so that I can'. If we go back to what we recognised before, that the amount of strain and tear injuries increase traditionally during the preseason by making sure that we're not fear based, that we're actually growth based and there's a plan of attack, there's a strategy and structure put in place, it will lower that anxious feeling of 'I need to do more' and be more focused on quality over quantity. Now, this doesn't mean you don't work as hard, this doesn't actually mean that you don't do as much. It just means that everything you do do is on purpose. It's not just because 'I want to amass the numbers, I want to make sure that I've got all the numbers on my side'. It's looking at and saying, 'What do I actually need to do and of what I need to do, what's that purpose?'.
So we create relevance, we create purpose, we create momentum and we also get a much better balance of serotonin over cortisol. And we know that serotonin is way better for our body than cortisol. Cortisol, being fight or flight, has a lot of negative aspects to it from a sustainability and a long exposure perspective. We know that when we're put under pressure or any kind of anxiety for a long period of time, there's a lot of physiological consequences to that action. So of course we want to be in a much happier and much more controlled, certainly a lot calmer place, not only from our mental and emotional welfare, but also from our physiological welfare. So be more solution based thinking, making sure that it's driven towards a perspective. A purpose. When we're in preseason. And making sure that those goals and objectives are the end of the season, not day one of the season. That will lower a lot of the expectation and a lot of the anxiety that comes with, I need to be good enough.
Of course you do. Of course you do need to be good enough. However, when's the best return on that investment? Is it coming hard out the gate and then not making it to the second game? Or is it still being there at the end of the season consistently and continually growing so that you can then establish your ownership over that sport?
So now let's look at the start of the season and we want to be more internally referenced. If we go back to when we looked at the traditional cycle, normally what we do at the start of the season, we want to come hard out of the gate like we just said, and the gauge is, 'Am I good enough compared to my competitors?' 'Am I ready compared to other competitors in my team so I am getting selected and them, maybe not.' 'What does my club think about me?' 'What does my sponsor think about me?' 'What about the selectors for our national or international teams, what do they think about me?' This external focus doesn't allow us to be controlled in our process because we're reactionary. We're looking for a reaction from somebody or something else in order to gauge: are we on track? And because we don't actually have control over what other people think and do, our process becomes highly reactionary and highly emotive.
Becoming more internally referenced, and consciously choosing to be way more internally referenced, gives us back that sense of control. It doesn't mean we're blinded to what's going on around us. That would just be naive. We want to make sure that we have a sustainable model, a framework that allows us to be more internally referenced, yet have an external ratification. And in order to do that, we need to put an entourage around us, people who feed us the right and – this is the most important thing – relevant information so that we can make the smartest decisions. I often say to athletes and coaches that an athlete needs to be internally referenced with external ratification. What that means is 'I need to trust me. I need to know what I'm doing is the best thing for me. However, I've got key people around me that I say to, "This is what I'm doing. What do you think?" Or say, "This is my plan of attack. These are my actions I'm going to take. Would you be doing the same thing?"' So if you notice the way that that's framed, 'I'm backing me. I've built this. I'm the one that's on track here who's got all the master plan in my mind. However, I want to collect relevant data and I want to do that from key people whose opinions I trust.'
So if you're gauging your performance based off social media and what the response or the reaction was to the last week's game, then the reality is you've just handed over any kind of control over your performance – certainly any kind of control over your mental or emotional welfare – to the masses who don't have all the data. They're just going off their emotional reaction. So you're compounding that.
Even if you just blindly follow what every single coach says to you. Now this might be a little bit controversial because not all coaches give you the best information. The quality of the information you received is always dictated by the quality of the question. So if you're not asking the question yet, you're being given information, ask yourself, what would I have asked to get the information and does it actually address that? If it does, excellent. You've now got some credible data. If it doesn't, find the right people and ask the right questions. The better you create the outcome of collected data, the more you can choose to do with it.
So now let's look at the mid- to the back-end of the season. And at this point you should be seeing significant momentum and growth. Again, traditionally, when we get to the mid- to back-end of the season, people are holding on tight. They don't want things to fall apart. Their biggest fear is, 'What if I don't make it to the end?' Yet, what I'm saying is that at this same stage we should be looking at consistently growing. We want to make sure that we're better this week than we were last week. And the fact we're going to be better next week than we are today. Having this growth mindset again helps us feed the momentum. It helps us make sure that everything we're doing is on purpose.
So what we want to be able to be focusing on is eating elephants when we're preparing for the start of the season. So during our preseason planning stage, we want to make sure that we have this big picture of the elephant. Now, of course, I am not actually talking about a real elephant. I'm talking about this concept that we eat an elephant a chunk at a time. If we try to eat a whole elephant, we're going to choke. So we want to break that elephant down into bite size chunks. And each of those chunks should correlate to a stage throughout our season.
When I was working with one of the racing car drivers, and we were doing ovals in America. And racing in the ovals is traditionally something that people crash a lot at because they do hundreds of laps in the same position, holding onto the vehicle in the same process, going around in an oval. And when we first went to do the first race, I said, 'How many laps are there?' We broke that down into blocks of three laps. Every third lap needs to be a different focus point. And their focus needs to be on 'this' during that whole period, so it becomes quality over quantity. Of course, there's a squillion and seven things that these impressive racing car drivers have to do. Driving at hundreds of miles an hour, holding onto a vehicle that all it wants to do is fling you out of the track as the centrifugal force pulls you up. So what we want to be able to do is make sure that our mind is engaged the whole time. If our mind is engaged not to crash, the likelihood is we know we get what we focus on, and the most front of thought thought there is crashing. So we're more likely to make a mistake. We want to be ultra focused on something that's going to give us the best return on investment. And trust me, crashing is not that. So we want to focus on something that we can impact. So this racing car driver, we looked at the multiple laps that he's potentially going to do. We broke that down into: every third lap, we shift into a different focal point. And then we looked at all the key things that he needed to focus on throughout that race. At the start, he had to focus on one which led into the next one, which led into the next one, which led into the next one. This compartmentalisation thought process allowed him to stay in control, allowed him to optimise every third lap. He was looking to grow, and by the end of the race, he was still increasing the efficiency of his racing and decreasing his lap times. He was the only driver on that track to do it that way.
We understand that being able to compartmentalise, to take control, to optimise what we do in bite sized chunks, allows us to get a better return on investment; to make sure that we have a greater control over our trajectory. If he was racing around the oval, got to halfway and said, 'Right, all I'm going to do now is hold on and not crash.' He would never have grown. He would never have improved. He would only have stunted any kind of control that he had over that moment.
What you do for a living, what your sport is, I'm sure you can see the same correlation and the same outcome if all you're trying to do is not lose rather than grow. So the mid- to the back-end of the season needs to be a significant growth process, and that needs to be set at the preseason stage. Because the preseason feeds into the season, the season feeds into the outcome. So the objective and as long as they're all linked, you can see value and purpose in every action. And that has a compounding effect. It allows us to compound control, allows us to compound momentum, and of course, compound confidence.Those three key elements will give us a way more sustainable outcome.
So now let's look at the post season. We've talked before that most athletes, what they do is they dive for the line. They get to the last game of the season, the last race, or whatever it is for you. And your whole objective is, 'Thank goodness that is over. I don't have to worry about that. Let me go and hide. Let me go on holiday. Let me stop everything that I've been doing.' Now that may seem like a really logical thing to do. And like I said when we were talking about the traditional cycle that most athletes follow, absolutely you need to do something to reward and recognise what you've done throughout the year. And a great holiday is a great way of doing that. It's all about you. It's all about relaxing and recognition. However, if that holiday's only objective is to hide from the very difficult season you've just had and put off the start of the next season, then you're not going into that with either the right mindset about what you can be doing or the right recognition of what you've just achieved.
So we're losing out on so many aspects of opportunity to optimise. The off season is a really critical time of your training and your preparation and your performance to collect the right kind of data. To be able to analytically look back at that season and go, 'Okay, what worked? What's something within that season, the multiple things that I did throughout that season, that I want to replicate? It worked for me.' You've now just reduced the amount of thinking you have to do because you've got a pattern that you've already applied that you know works for you, and you've just given it an increased sense of value. So whatever worked throughout that preseason, that's the date I want to collect. I also want to recognise – again, we don't want to be naive – the things that didn't work so that we can either replace them, rebuild them or look at if you actually need them anyway. Were they feeding the right return on investment or were they just there to make me feel better? So being able to collect the right kind of data is critical either for replicability or replacement and even the value of, 'What am I actually doing? Am I doing more just to get more? Or am I being smart about what I'm doing?'
Then preemptively, what we want to do is put a framework together for the next season before we even have our holidays, before we even shut down and take that well earned rest. We want to make sure that in our mind we've got a framework that we're going to come back and fine tune. Because I guarantee you, you might want to get out of there as quickly as you possibly can; you might want to just go and escape to some island somewhere where they can't get you; you can't read social media; you can't have your coach going, 'Hey, are you still running X amount of miles a day? Are you still doing this to prepare?' You want to make sure that you can go, 'Look, I know what I need. I know where I'm going. I've put the framework in place and I've scheduled time in here to say it's okay for me to go and have some downtime.' And you can get up every morning and go and walk the beach if that's what you're doing, and not have to be in the back of your mind thinking, I've got to be ready for next week, I've only got four days, I've only got two weeks. Or whatever it is. And you can't enjoy the quality of your downtime because you're concerned and have anxiety about the upcoming season.
The other aspect we want to be very conscious of is stopping the momentum. If we follow the format that we've just talked about and optimising our season, we have this great amount of momentum with us. If we stop it, we've just increased its mass in the first place. We've now got to get that even bigger thing than last season moving again. And the likelihood is those new aspects that we've been working on don't stick. So the likelihood is we're going to have to rebuild them again. That's just a waste of our energy. That's not a good return on investment. So actually stopping the momentum is counterproductive. We want to be able to frame it and structure in such a way that we maintain that momentum at a much reduced rate, almost letting it roll along on its own without us having to apply too much thought or action to it. So the things like visualisation, the things like journaling, the things like ball bouncing, all these cognitive exercises we put in place that don't take up as much of your time should be maintained throughout your off season.
And of course, there's the physicality things that you would probably want to do, like continue to run. Once you learn how to recognise what's relevant and needs to be implemented to maintain some of that momentum, getting it moving again at the start of the preseason becomes a way easier prospect and something that's not emotionally overwhelming: 'Argh, another season, I've got so much work to do.' When the reality is you should come off your holiday: 'Okay, I'm ready. I'm already moving. I'm already thinking in the right way. I've already got some kind of physicality or technique that I know I can just add to that's going to get that momentum back up to speed.' And obviously the relaxing too, when you're in downtime needs to be good quality, because, as we said before, the non athlete, the student athlete and the performer are critical steps to maintain. So the non athlete, the relaxed time, the off sport version of you is just as important because that feeds into everything that we do. So making sure the quality is there, understanding there are key things we can do to make that work, to not allow that momentum to stop and to make you recognise the key things that you need to do versus what you want to do.
So we've looked today in this podcast at the traditional cycle of an athlete. The preseason, the start of the season, the mid- to back-end of the season and the post season. We've then looked at the traditional flaws in that process. The injury increase, the anxiety increase, the holding on too tight, the holding pattern, the external ratification all the time, the external focus on what other people think rather than basically trusting what you think. And the end step driven, 'All I want to do is go and hide, that season is over, don't talk to me,' kind of mindset. And our solution to all of those is making sure it's better planned. We want to eat that elephant over the whole season. We want to make sure that what we've got sustains us throughout the whole season. We want to make sure that we consistently and continually grow, as well as maintain stability and replicability. We want to make sure that what we're doing is quality over quantity. And we're doing it for purpose, not in fear. All of these exercises are essentially a shift in the way that we choose to think about them.
We want to make sure that we're optimising and growing and being excited about what we can do, rather than holding on tight and in fear of what could go wrong. This shift in mindset is 100% controllable by you. There are key strategies that you can learn to optimise that, however, where you choose to place your emotion – we talked about this during our Number 73 podcast – where you choose to place the emotion will dictate not only the clarity of the process you want to follow but also the emotional intensity of that process. If you can't see it, you're going to have an increase in anxiety. If you can see it, you have an increase in control. Both of those will give you very different outcomes and sustainability throughout your season.
I hope it's allowed you to see you as an athlete, your preparation and your management of your season in a completely different format today. Give you back a sense of control. That sense of, 'I actually enjoy what I do. I actually enjoy the process of being an elite or professional athlete.' Because that is essentially why you started doing this. It was to enjoy it. It was to get the most out of it. It's not something that you should be hating or something you should be fearing or at least thinking, This is way too hard. You want to make sure that you get to enjoy every moment of your career as an elite athlete. Because when it's over – when you move into the next phase of either your sporting career, if you're going to coach, or you go into media, or you go into something like I do or completely opposite – you want to be able to take the skill sets and the strategies and the processes that you've learned as the world's best at what you do into whatever phase you move into. If they're highly negatively associated, then your brain will do its best to hide those processes from you. So you won't be able to take them forward. What your brain will do is hide them in the recesses of your mind where you can't access them anymore. So this obviously has a much further reach than just this season.
If you're enjoying these podcasts and getting a lot of information out of them yet looking to take your training to the next level, I've created an online training programme called Building Champion Minds. It gives you the strategies that you need to be able to implement to move forward. You can either click the link directly below this podcast and it will take you to the Building Champion Minds website or you can go to my website, smartmind.com/championminds.
I hope you got a lot out of today's episode and I look forward to working through another topic with you in a couple of weeks' time. Until then, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle and I'm the mind coach.
Copyright Dave Diggle
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