Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

I’ve learned to accept that pain is part of growth. Not necessarily emotional pain, and surely not pain from disease. The pain I’ve learned to accept is the pain from pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Typically this pain is the result of training or competing and is more mental than physical.

Looking back over the years, I can trace most of my successes and failures back to my love hate relationship with pain. This is why an important part of what I seek to do is help young athletes understand the importance of positive training pain. Positive training pain is training to intentionally create nonthreatening pain in order to build tolerance. Research shows that training in this method can enhance an athlete’s performance.

However, incorporating positive training pain into a training regimen is just one piece to the puzzle. It’s not the end all be all for dealing with the mental side of pain.

Today I’d like to share another clue to solve this puzzle. It’s from David Linden, Ph.D. a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Linden’s research while complex, can be broken down into a rather simple premise:

Even though scientists have identified which types of nerves in the skin are responsible for transmitting specific types of sensory information, Linden emphasizes, 90 percent of the action is in the brain.

The Intensity of How we Feel Pain is a State of Mind

When it comes to pain, this basically means that although pain itself is not a state of mind, the intensity of how we feel the pain is. What’s more, Linden’s research suggest that positive emotions can minimize the intensity of the pain one feels. Furthermore, the reverse effect of having negative emotions increases the intensity of pain.

This further illustrates why kid’s don’t like coaches who yell. Environments dominated by negative coaching would (conceptually) increase the pain of training. If this is true, then it follows that if parents or coaches create negative stress before or during a competition, then an athlete’s ability to dig deep when facing fatigue will diminish.

My theory based on Linden’s research at this point is two-fold:

1. It’s possible to enhance the effects of positive training pain by creating negative and stressful emotions in the athlete. But only if the athlete buys-in and understands in advance why this is being done.
2. During competitions, parents, coaches, and athletes must train their minds to focus on channeling positive thoughts and emotions. At the same time, they must learn to suppress negative thoughts and emotions so they don’t get in the way.