Sport Psychology Blog

Here is a training tip: end practice on a make. This means to end your practice on a good note. The easiest example of this is basketball practice. End your basketball practice on a made shot. Keep shooting until you make a desired shot, then end your practice. You can apply this to any other sport. If you're a QB, you can end on a good throw. If you're a tennis player, you can end on a good serve. There are 2 points of doing this. First, it teaches persistence (don't give up until you make the shot). Second, it helps your confidence. You want to end on a positive note, with your confidence high. You want your last memory of your practice to be good. It also helps with closure. After a made shot at the end of practice, it is easier to move on and focus on the rest of your day. However, there is an alternative way to end practice that I also like. I call it ending on "sudden death." You can also call it ending on "match point." There are 2 ways to

Sometimes high school athletes will ask me this question. They ask "how do I get recruited?" or "how can I get an athletic scholarship?" I'm not an expert regarding the first question but I still give them advice. I tell them that while self-promotion is important, it is much more important to focus on the process of improving. In order to earn an athletic scholarship or become a walk-on on a college team, you first have to be good enough. You can't fake your way to a scholarship. You can't trick a coach into giving you a scholarship that you don't actually deserve. So worry first about getting good enough. Keep working as hard and smart as you possibly can. Train like a collegiate or pro athlete even while you're in high school. This is how you pass your competition and earn a scholarship. Be so good that coaches and recruiting services can't help but notice you. Focus on the process and let the outcome, promotion, and recruiting take care

As you’ve noticed, I’m on the rest and recovery bandwagon. I’ve written about the topic for the last few weeks. However, I have a serious question about rest and recovery. Is it overrated? Is it always practical? As I’ve written before, rest and recovery is meant to do a few things. First, it helps get your body back to full strength, which allows for peak performance. Second, it prevents injuries, and third, it lengthens your career.  However, these things come with trade-offs. When you rest, you help your body and longevity, but you hurt your short-term skill development. While you’re resting, you could be training more and developing more skills. If you over-train and develop lots of skills, you risk injuries and you add more “miles,” or wear and tear on your body. You sacrifice part of your health, “freshness,” and longevity, but in the short-term, you gain more skills.  So which set of trade-offs is better? My past writing would suggest that emphasizing rest

These last few weeks I've talked about how you should have an ideal balance of training and rest . One factor that determines how much you should train and how much you should rest is your motivation level and mindset ( attitudes ). The more motivated you are, the less you need to rest and recover mentally. As a serious athlete, you still need to recover a lot physically and mentally to maintain your health and performance, but if you're highly motivated, then you don't need as much rest to "recharge your batteries," mentally. If a less motivated athlete has an intense week of training, they may need a full week to rest and focus on other priorities. In other words, they need more "rewards" (rest) to justify their training. A more motivated athlete doesn't need this much time to rest. A day or two may be enough. This is because they are goal-driven and they also like training, so after a good rest day, they are ready mentally to get back to the gr

Last week I talked about the importance of rest and recovery . I mentioned that not all rest is equally good. Some people rest better than other. The quality of your rest is determined by how well (and quickly) it helps you recover physically and mentally. Some people spend their rest days laying down all day watching TV. This is not a good use of a rest day. First of all, this passive form of recovery isn't that effective. Doing some light physical activity such as walking helps your body recover better than just laying down all day (increases blood flow). Secondly, you need to also actively recover your body by doing things such as stretching, icing, getting massages, etc . These things help your body recover back to full strength much faster than just laying down all day. However, the best and most natural form of physical recovery is in fact, sleeping. Getting an extra couple hours of sleep during rest days is very important. Furthermore, spending your rest days just laying

As we know, Kobe Bryant is a very hard worker and wants to do his best in everything that he does. He did not disappoint in his book The Mamba Mentality . It is a quality book, especially in hardcover, full of nice, big photographs. It is very easy to read, with short paragraphs on each page. It is very insightful and entertaining at the same time. I especially recommend this book to basketball players, coaches, and Kobe fans, but this book can also be helpful for any athlete or coach. I want to begin by explaining the main message of the book and the idea behind the “Mamba Mentality.” Kobe defines the Mamba Mentality as the process of reaching an end result. It is the attitudes, motives, values, habits, behaviors, and knowledge needed to reach your biggest goals in life. From learning about Kobe’s mentality, you can learn how to better reach your goals. Much of the way Kobe thinks and behaves can be applied by others. However, Kobe is not saying that his mentality is the best and tha