How Mentally Tough Athletes Train to Push Themselves to the Limit
Mental toughness is not just an idea, it’s a practice. Too often parents, coaches, and fans think of mental toughness in vague terms instead of its practical application. However, athletes do what’s practical not what sounds good.
So, when someone tells an athlete he or she needs to toughen up, it goes in one ear and out the other. Without defining in practical terms what it means to toughen up, athletes have no practical changes to focus on during their training.
With this in mind, I have a go-to research paper I use to formalize mental toughness as a practical application. It’s written by sport psychologists Sheldon Hanton, Graham Jones, and Declan Connaughton. The title of it is “A Framework of Mental Toughness in the World’s Best Performers“.
The authors do an excellent job putting rigor around the idea of mental toughness. Several weeks ago I broke down what the authors found to be the six attributes that define how a mentally tough athlete trains. Today, I want to quickly highlight the practicality of attribute #5:
The uncanny ability to embrace training pain and deriving “pleasure from being able to give absolutely everything.”
As part of this attribute of mental toughness, athletes do two specific things to push themselves to their limit.
- Focus more on the parts of training that other people consider painful.
- Practice showing that they are better than everyone else by training in supremely competitive environments.
These are two very practical goals an athlete working on mental toughness can focus on. Correspondingly, finding ways to help athletes push themselves to their limit using these two methods is an ideal way to make mental toughness not just an idea, but a practice.