What it Means When Your Coach Tells You ‘Fatigue is Mental’
Coaches with experience intuitively know what to tell athletes who visually show signs of fatigue to help them keep pushing. When a coach tells athletes things like “no pain, no gain”, “mind over matter”, or “keep your head up” it’s not coaches’ speak or pseudo-science.
Fatigue is the great equalizer in sports. The biggest, strongest, and fastest athletes are only a shell of themselves once fatigue causes exhaustion. Moreover, an athlete may be in the best physical shape of their life and still become exhausted prematurely. The reason for this is because fatigue is as much mental as it is physical.
So, if you don’t work on the mental side of conditioning against fatigue, the physical side is less effective. This is not to say that the physical capacity of one’s muscles and lungs matter less. Unquestionably, athletes must be physically capable of enduring the stress of fatigue. However, research suggest that fatigue is far more of a mental state than most people realize.
Hard Work Feels Harder When You Think Negative
The bottom line is that hard work feels harder when you don’t want to do it. These negative thoughts appear in your self-talk and in your body language. Therefore, the things you do as a habit with your body language and self-talk play an important role in dictating the impact of fatigue on performance.
When you don’t want to do something, you fatigue faster. This is ultimately why preventing negative thoughts and eliminating negative thoughts is such an important mental skill. Fatigue plays a major factor in competitions between elite athletes. A tiny mental edge here and there can have a significant impact to the ultimate outcome.
So, when a coach tells you to “keep your head up”, they are really telling you to both think and look positive, be optimistic, and eliminate negative thoughts. It is in your best interest to listen.