TRAINING LAB:

ATHLETE PSYCHOLOGY

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Get Your Mind Right: 6 Common Questions around Mental Skills Training for Young Athletes

Author: Jim Afremow

Jim shares tips for youth sports coaches, parents, and athletes to get started with mental skills training, discusses the mindset challenges facing young players, and explains the power of practicing between the ears.

Preparing Weightlifters Physically and Mentally for Nationals

Author: Whitney Rodden

I’ve had the privilege of coaching multiple young men and women on their path to college weightlifting nationals. While the school I serve, MidAmerica Nazarene University, is a small liberal arts institution, I like to think that we punch above our weight, and that’s certainly the case with our lifters.

Coaching Communication in Strength and Conditioning? Your Buy In Matters More Than Your Athletes

Author: Rob Van Valkenburgh

You have to invest your time into truly getting to know your athlete’s on a very deep level. Not to mention, that investing in the relationship you have with your athletes is what coaching is all about.

Want to Make Your Athletes Fit, Healthy, and Well? Your online habits need to change

Author: Kenny Kane

As we combined anecdotal observations, with more objective analysis, it became clear that this wasn’t a simple topic and that we’d need to go much further, both for the sake of furthering our own understanding and, even more significantly, for the good of the athletes and coaches I serve.

Strength & Conditioning Certifications: What Is The True Value?

Author: Tim Robinson

The journey to becoming certified is where you’ll find the true value, not from simply receiving the certificate or certification. Any other way of attacking a certification or ascertaining a certificate will cause you to be found wanting at the end of the process.

Coach Communication + The Importance Of Relationships

Author: Patrick Nolan

Communication is everything when it comes to building a culture. Lack of communication between anyone in the chain is a kink in the armor, ultimately leading to a dysfunctional culture that tolerates harmful behavior.

Performance Psychology 2.0 Part 4: The Interplay Between Awareness, Regulation, and Reflection

Author: Jared Cohen

Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-reflection are foundational. Once you understand them, they open a gateway to all the other mental skills and give them purpose and direction.

Self-Reflection (Performance Psychology Series Part 3)

Author: Jared Cohen

Like breathing, self-reflection is happening all the time unconsciously. Our brains are wired to assign causality to make sense out of what you experience as a means of influencing your future behavior.

Performance Psychology Series Part 3: Self Reflection

Author: Jared Cohen

In this third post of the series, we’re advancing to the final stage of our logical progression in performance psychology: self-reflection.

Youth Sports Part 3: Tapping into Learning Styles

It’d be so easy to coach if every young athlete learned in the same way, wouldn’t it? But unfortunately, that isn’t the case. So even though you might be very comfortable communicating and teaching in a certain fashion, a one-size-fits-all approach is only going to benefit a fraction of the players you’re trying to coach. The rest are either going to have sub-optimal learning experiences or the lessons will go completely over their heads.

Coach as Counselor Part 3 – How to Spot Mental Health Red Flags

In the previous two posts in this series, we explored ways to clean up your athletes’ mental hygiene and how to use your situational awareness to spot intuitively when someone is struggling. For this third installment, we’re turning our attention to how we can combine subjective observation and objective measurements to monitor players’ mental health and hopefully spot any red flags so we can address an issue like anxiety or depression before it escalates.

Max Out Lifting: 4 Tips to Going Beast Mode

Every once in a while, we like to max out lifting on major lifts to get an idea how your training is progressing and to give a relatively accurate number we can use for weight selection in upcoming workouts.