PSYCHOLOGY
A SERIES rowing & psychology Brain Power: WORDS // DAVE ALCOCK I 84
t’s 4.00 AM, the alarm goes off, you can hear the rain pounding on the window. It’s time to get up and go out on the water... Your arms, back, and seemingly every other muscle in your body ache, the
monotonous creaks of the ergo drone in your ears, another 1000m to go... everything in your body is racing except for you, heart thumping, sweating, stomach churning, and final is still three hours away... the coach has singled you out yet again. “Why me?” you ask. I’m finding it hard to cope with all this pressure, all this success...
Any of this sound familiar?
What is sport psychology? What might any of this have to do with sports psychology? Putting it simply, working with rowers who have found some of the above situations impacting negatively on their performance is part of the everyday work of applied sport psychologists. Applied sport psychology, at its very core, focuses on enabling the athlete to be the best that he or she can be; it explores the relationship between psychological/ emotional factors and sporting performance. As a discipline, the use of sport psychology has quickly moved from being seen as a perceived weakness to a position where it is seen
as an essential piece of kit in the tool box of elite or aspiring athletes.
Issues in relation to rowing Let’s start with motivation.
Motivation is the essential reservoir on which we draw in order to continue to perform; it is the fuel that drives all of our actions. If you have no motivation, you will do nothing. If you are unmotivated, you will perform less than optimally. If you are highly motivated, the likelihood is that you will be en route to being the best you can be. So what are the tips to maintaining high levels of motivation? There are no easy answers, but I’ve listed some possibilities for you to consider: • Reflect upon performance and savour the positives: focused reflection has been found to be an integral element in the development of mental toughness. Allocate specific time, on a regular basis, to reflect on your performance (whether in training or competition). In doing so, do not dwell on mistakes or things that have gone wrong. Acknowledge areas where improvements can be made, spend time thinking about your successes – this is part of a process of developing positive psychological orientation to your rowing career.
• Spend time nurturing your sporting relationships: there are no sports in which the athlete works in complete
isolation: the golfer has his or her caddie, the racing driver has a team of 100+ working for him/her, and the rower has teammates, coaches, and others, all of whom can have an impact on motivational levels.
• Look for opportunities to express your “autonomy”: imagine an environment in which you could make no choices, where everything you did was controlled by someone else. How long do you think it might be before your motivational levels dropped significantly, before you decided that this was not the sport for you? In my experience, it wouldn’t be long. So in rowing, look for opportunities for you to express yourself, to contribute; feeling valued is an essential ingredient in the development and maintenance of intrinsic motivation.
Specific tips The areas highlighted above refer to what I would call “process” issues. More specific interventions, and the ones that many of you will be familiar with from general coaching/sport psychology arenas, might include the following:
• Appropriate goal setting. There is a reason why goal setting crops up in most discussions of how to improve sporting performance. The bottom line is that when goal setting is carried out appropriately, it works.
ROW360 // Issue 001
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