Athletes Who Aren’t Mentally Weak Must Also Work on Mental Toughness
Just because an athlete is mentally tough today, does not mean that athlete will be mentally tough tomorrow. Mental toughness is a muscle and just like all muscles atrophy will ensue if you don’t exercise it. Simply stated, use it, or lose it.
Therefore, it’s important that all athletes work on their mental toughness even if they aren’t mentally weak. This means making sure that on a regular basis athletes incorporate positive training pain into their process. Positive training pain is training to intentionally create non-threatening pain.
Using Positive Training Pain to Train Mental Toughness
The goal of positive training pain is to improve an athlete’s mental toughness by pushing them beyond their pain tolerance while keeping the pain threshold under the athlete’s control. In other words, positive training pain is not a punishment. Instead, it’s a process the athlete agrees to participate in while knowing they can stop it if they choose.
Don’t think of pain as just physical pain either. Think of it in terms of multiple types of pain including the pain of failure, fatigue, boredom, and fear.
For example, if a traditionally mentally tough athlete goes an entire year without losing, then their ability to be mentally tough after a loss will diminish. It may be time for that athlete to face a training situation that facilitates the experience of losing as a form of positive training pain.
This may require cross-training in a different sport they are not good at or competing against impossible odds in their current sport. Either way, finding a way to train the mental toughness muscles is a must to retain those muscles.
Moreover, each muscle is unique. After all, being mentally tough in the face of fatigue is completely different than being mentally tough when facing failure. Each muscle requires a unique training plan to ensure it stays strong.