Can you remember the 1988 Seoul Olympics? If you can’t remember or weren’t even born yet, then it’s worthwhile Googling Greg Lagounis. Warning: if you’re a bit squeamish you’ll find it a bit off-putting as he hit his head on the diving board. Hard.
Lagounis smashed the back of his head on the diving board in a bad preliminary round mistake. He suffered a concussion and had stitches. It looked bad. Really bad. Years of training and countless dollars were on the line. What happened? He went on to score the highest score in the qualifying round and went on to win Olympic Gold by a margin of 25 points. How? Why?
Resilience.
He had, and his coach had a plan to bounce back from a mistake. He knew that a mistake was a moment in time not a label for the whole competition or even his career.
So how can you learn to apply resilience and bounce-back to your training? At ANS we like to provide answers and so we’ve found a few great articles on how you can bounce back and grow - no matter what you’re doing or how hard you train.
This article gives you some great tips on how you can coach yourself back from a bad training session or performance.
Certainly, psychologists often talk about the difference between “grit”, “perseverance”, “toughness” and “resilience”. It seems that resilience seems to involve the ability to take stock of what happened without emotion, to learn from it and grow. And grow. We love this Youtube video on perseverance and heed the messages in our own training.
Finally, we need to talk about nutrition. One of the most crippling elements of regular training is recovery. Of course, we would advocate the use of a high quality protein powder with at least 70% Isolate for quick muscle recovery, but there is a whole bank of information online for athletes on making great dietary decisions. We like this fact sheet from the perspective of sports dieticians. Fighting fatigue is within everyone’s reach!
Thanks for taking the time to learn about some self-coaching answers. Take care of you.