Alta Therapy recognizes coaches across all disciplines of extreme sport and the responsibility they each carry to teach lifesaving skills to new participants. The knowledge passed down is the culmination of life experience, science and experimentation, and concrete understanding of the sport itself. 

Activities that are considered “extreme” partly advance in technology and level of difficulty because of incidents and precedents experienced by other people in the past. We all learn from one another and continue to grow together. Although mental coaching and talk-therapy may be an unprecedented concept in these communities, there is a reason for our mission.

ACUITY PROMOTES SAFETY

Each sport requires gear-checks, and a solid plan prior to executing maneuvers. 

Mental check-ins are a critical facet of the very same gear-checks.

Coaches and instructors can benefit from learning sport psychology skills that streamline teaching and enhance the learning experience. Competitors and students can benefit from this information alongside being coached. All are welcome to inquire about educational sessions and group workshops. 

The following information covers Alta Therapy’s approach to promoting resilience, accuracy, focus, confidence, and attention, which undoubtedly translates to other areas of people’s lives outside of sport.

Sports Psychology Strengthens Communication and Performance

Clear lines of communication and substantive feedback are critical to ensuring a student or competitor’s overall success in their sport, as well as measuring effectiveness of coaching.

For Instructors and Coaches:

A constructive coach-athlete relationship forms through deep trust, mutual respect, and very clear communication. As coaches and instructors prioritize understanding their athletes on an individual level, prior to helping the student understand the material or maneuver, the likelihood of success increases. Learning to gauge students’ overall stress levels and helping them to regulate will allow for performance to shine through after. 

For Students:

These tools can greatly improve the student’s ability to remain focused longer, notice when focus is lost and use best-practice judgement and skill while continuing to process new information, increase information retention speed, and increase the probability of keeping safe. 

The largest benefit is that recipients of coaching at any level are more likely to take on psychotherapeutic tools for themselves long after the instruction takes place. 

Creating an environment that encourages open communication in the coach-athlete relationship allows coaches to understand their athletes and the mental, emotional, somatic difficulties they are having. This awareness can lead to support and assistance when overcoming obstacles throughout their career.

Benefits of Psychotherapy for Athletes

☑️ Mental Resilience Athletics can be as demanding mentally as it is physically. Psychotherapy equips athletes with techniques to build mental resilience, manage stress, overcome performance anxiety, and develop effective coping strategies. By strengthening your mental fortitude, you can push past your limits and perform at your best under pressure.

☑️ Goal Setting and Motivation Psychotherapy helps athletes clarify their goals and develop a clear vision of what they want to achieve. Our therapists work closely with you to create personalized strategies that keep you motivated, focused, and determined to succeed. By aligning your thoughts and actions, you’ll be better equipped to stay on track, overcome obstacles, and maintain your drive towards success.

☑️ Performance Visualization Visualization is a powerful technique used by many successful athletes. Psychotherapy helps you harness the full potential of visualization by developing vivid mental imagery of achieving your goals. By consistently visualizing success, you can enhance your confidence, improve technique, and optimize your performance.

☑️ Emotion Regulation Emotions play a significant role in athletic performance. Psychotherapy enables you to understand and regulate your emotions effectively. By developing emotional intelligence, you can manage the highs and lows of competitive sports, maintain focus, and make rational decisions when it matters most.

☑️ Enhancing Concentration In the fast-paced world of sports, maintaining concentration is crucial. Psychotherapy equips athletes with strategies to improve focus, eliminate distractions, and enter the highly sought-after state of flow. By sharpening your ability to concentrate, you can maximize your performance, react swiftly, and make split-second decisions with precision.

☑️ Injury Recovery and Resilience Injuries are an unfortunate part of an athlete’s journey, often accompanied by mental and emotional setbacks. Psychotherapy provides support during injury recovery, helping you navigate psychological challenges, maintain a positive mindset, and build resilience. By addressing fears, doubts, and concerns, you can accelerate your recovery and regain your pre-injury performance level.

☑️ Team Dynamics and Communication Athletics often involve working within a team or under the guidance of coaches. Psychotherapy enhances interpersonal skills, communication, and collaboration within a team setting. By improving team dynamics, you can cultivate a positive and supportive environment that fosters growth, trust, and synergy.

How Can Coaches Incorporate Sport Psychology Concepts?

Coaches can incorporate aspects of sport psychology into practice and in the form of games. Sport psychology concepts are most effective when they are frequently reinforced, are associated with positive memories. Below are five practical ways to integrate sport psychology concepts into your daily coaching routine:

• Before practice, discuss your goals for your time together by highlighting what is unique about that day’s activities. Have athletes tell a partner (or other coach), what one thing they hope to improve upon or have a better understanding of by the completion of training.
• Practice relaxation at the start and end of each coaching session. Take one minute to have athletes complete a body scan or a set of rhythmic breathing. Taking this time after training allows athletes to become aware of how their body feels and use these skills with or without coaches around.
• Implement check-ins to create open lines of communication with each athlete and the team. Be aware of the athletes’ emotional and somatic states as they learn new skills. Understand that when athletes learn new skills, they may become frustrated or overstimulated. A check-in may be as simple as asking athletes at the end of practice to share with the group, or a partner, one difficulty and one triumph that occurred during the practice session.
• Use the “positive sandwich” when providing feedback. When an athlete makes a mistake, instead of telling them what not to do; point out what they did right, give a future-oriented critique, and a word of encouragement. A positive sandwich in volleyball could sound like, “Hey great job getting your feet in place. Next time try not to swing your arms. Keep up the hustle!” This feedback technique provides encouragement and direction in a way that athletes can respond to and improve upon.

Key Sport Psychology Concepts for Coaches Students, and Higher-Level Athletes/Competitors:

To fully reach their potential, athletes must be supported both physically and mentally as they train and perform. Coaches have the access and the knowledge to understand who their athletes are and what they can become. 

Sport psychology allows coaches to leverage their current knowledge and support their athletes and bring them a mental edge during practice and competition.

☑️ Creating and Structuring Goals Goals can be set in team and individual settings by using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) principle. Based on the athlete or team’s ability, coaches can identify 5-10 goals for the competitive season and discuss progress metrics throughout the season. 

The goals identified by the coach or athlete should be revisited and reexamined throughout the season and off-season. These milestones provide both coaches and athletes with a standard to evaluate their experience and the effectiveness of training/coaching programs.

☑️ Choosing Effective Self-Talk The relationship between the athlete and their thoughts is a critical component where coaches can intervene using basic sport psychology concepts. Athletes’ self-talk (internal dialogue with themselves throughout competitions and practice) impacts performance. Interestingly, there’s more than one category of efficient self-talk in sports psychology, and each category aims to address a different need in performance enhancement.

Coaches can help athletes monitor their self-talk by asking them about their thoughts during specific situations or events. Athletes must first identify their self-talk to alter limiting, ridged, forceful, or reductionary self-talk. 

Reductionary self-talk can include thinking “I will never figure out how to fly my body like other jumpers” or “I’m not good enough to compete.” 

One example…

Once a coach helps an athlete identify their self-talk, they can work together to frame reductionary self-talk into more Instructional Self-Talk. Instructional self-talk may remind the athlete, “If I saw myself execute the maneuver once, its humanly possible to do it again, let’s count how long it takes until I nail it, and reduce the scale in between with practice. To do this, I first…” 

As one example of many, instructional self-talk will direct an athlete how to complete the movement next time. Instructional self-talk is not the same for each athlete, in skydiving, specifically in Swooping, an athlete might think “I will keep my knees and feet together and focus where I’m going next” to remind themselves how to complete a specific movement.

☑️ Collecting, Reading & Using Biofeedback Athletes experience physical and emotional stress (sometimes distress) during training and throughout the competitive season. Some extreme sports competitions are also hosted year-round, which increases the amount of stress hormones in the body on a consistent basis. 

If you are an athlete who reviews performance data using GPS systems and other technological means, intentionally assessing mental states and the body’s muscle tension are additional dimensions of performance feedback critical to the overall equation of progress. 

By learning how to quantify and collect biofeedback, athletes gain self-awareness and can reduce performance anxiety, increase accuracy and consistency, and increase overall safety.

Relaxation and focus can be achieved through knowing how to conduct body scans, choosing the most effective respiration pattern (breathwork), choose a mental visualization technique or engage in progressive muscle relaxation (PMR). There are countless other techniques we teach as sport-psychology consultants at Alta Therapy.

A Body-Scan assesses different muscles/parts of the body and allows athletes to evaluate what these areas are feeling. Body scans can be helpful before and after intense training to allow athletes to gain an awareness of how their body and muscles are feeling.

We’ve all heard of “breathing techniques,” but there is a good reason why the term is pluralized. For example, Ratio-Breathing is a general term that describes when an athlete assigns a specific amount of time for each inhale and exhale. This, along with most of these examples, is specifically tailored for each person at our practice.  

Let’s consider the respiratory system as a remote control for various neurological responses. 

There are many techniques for breathing, and knowing what each technique does for our nervous system is essential in choosing the right one in context. Using specific combinations of breathing and various cadences will command the brain to respond accordingly. If you know how to command the brain, performing a task becomes exponentially easier, and more enjoyable.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) reduces stress and helps control anxiety and can be completed by athletes tensing and relaxing specific muscle groups over a period. PMR can be used before or after competition to relax and reduce overall anxiety.

Some instructors in extreme sports have been practicing their craft for a very long time, both as educators and as participants, and feel they have their teaching style down pat. Some instructors are ready for a growth phase of their personalized teaching technique, and others are brand new to teaching.

Therefore, the thought of learning and applying new sport psychology tools may seem daunting or even unnecessary to some instructors and coaches for various reasons. Luckily, most sports psychology tools are simple, and can be used to support coaches and enthusiasts wherever they are in their careers. 

Our educational workshops and individual sports consulting are only designed to suggest ways of being more efficient and aware, and are in promotion of extreme sports being challenging, exhilarating, but mostly intentional and hopefully safer. In addition, there are master-class psychology skills that Alta Therapy can teach to improve an educator’s approach or an athlete’s approach at the highest levels as well.

If you’re interested, we would love to hear from you.