HOW TO MENTALLY PREPARE FOR THE OLYMPICS
How to mentally prepare for the Olympics? Generally preparing for the Olympics as an athlete includes several factors: such as career planning, planning of training and recovery (volume, content, and intensity; coordination between various aspects of technical, physical, and mental preparation; recover) and planning of which comps to previously take part in and which not (in climbing you could see, some didn't compete in the lead worldcups, some only in the first two, some others competed until Chamonix). To plan and prepare for such a big event, there are obviously multiple different experts involved in helping athletes.
How can sport psychologists help in the process of Olympic preparation?
Stambulova et al. (2012) see the major mission of sport psychologists in the process of Olympic preparation in the incorporation of a whole-person approach (Wylleman & Lavallee, 2004). According to this, athletes should not only be seen as people doing their sport on the highest level, but also (like every other human being) having other life issues, such as family, friends, loved ones, education, work, and so on. It's important to find a good balances between these different areas of life, such as, between sport and studies/work, or in relationships within their social network.
Questions that may be worked on can be:
How to mentally prepare for the Games
How to deal with the selection
How to balance out all areas of their life
How to balance out the training and relaxation – and hence, avoid injuries
How to properly plan the retirement – if an athlete intends to retire after the Games
When discussing how sport psychologists can help in the process of Olympic preparations, we should also discuss how they can help prepare for coping with adversity during the Games.
Here's a 3-step process to help athletes prepare for coping with adversity during the Games (e.g., Stambulova et al., 2006):
Collect as much information as possible about what to expect: the host city (time zone, climate, altitude, culture), Olympic village (living conditions, who will have access), competition venue (size, lighting, climbing wall), and Olympic competition (training and competition schedules, participants, route setters, etc.).
Create a list of potential adversities you must be prepared for encounter during the Games. Divide them into: predictable and expected (e.g. competition/venue rules, etc.) or less predictable and unexpected (e.g. music stopping, disturbing camera flash, minor injury, etc.). Next: create possible strategies to cope with each of them based on your previous experiences (e.g., Gould, 2001).
Simulate your strategies in your training! For this, both mental rehearsal (visualisation) and modelling adverse situations in actual training sessions can be useful useful, e.g. practising under recorded spectator noise, practising in the Olympic costumes, etc.). Training by simulation can help you to be more flexible and ready in case adversities happen. You know what to expect, and how to respond to each of them. To avoid panicking if something unanticipated happens, you should also learn some "meta-strategies", such as focussing on the present moment (e.g., by asking yourself: “What should I do right now?”) and dealing primarily with controllable aspects of the situation.
Another important factor which we didn’t experience in these Olympics are spectators. This time, the audience stands at the Olympics Games remained empty. No audience was allowed. However, is that rather hindering the performance of the athletes or rather performance-enhancing?
Let's see what sports psychology has to say about it: Perhaps you have heard of the term "training world champions" – athletes who manage to achieve top performance in training but cannot transfer their performance level to competitions. In psychology, this means “choking under pressure” and has been well researched. Aspects in a competition such as the volume or the audience can add additional pressure which athletes first have to learn to deal with. The brain has to generate much more “energy” in competitions, which draws energy and attention away from what really matters in this moment – the athletic performance. From this point of view, the audience would be performance-reducing. But as always, it is much more complex and does not apply to every situation, every sport and every athlete: in endurance sports, such as in a marathon, the audience can definitely be performance-enhancing, because the sporting task is not very complex – unlike e.g. in coordinative sports (gymnastics, dancing,...). I wonder, whether climbing may be counted in one of the latter category...
And there are many other factors: the athlete's level of expertise (professional vs. newcomer), personality traits and now there are even indications of gender. You see, psychology is once again much more complex than it seems at first glance. With that said, we will see next time whether, in what way and how much the audience at the next Olympic Games will impact the climbers. It certainly will be different compared to any other World Cups and athletes better mentally prepare themselves for this situation. 💫
If you want to level up your mindset, don’t hesitate to get in touch and schedule yourself your first free appointment.