At some point in your career, you will experience an athletic injury. Every runner does eventually. Athletic injuries that disrupt your training routines and prevent you from running regularly are unavoidable. What many runners fail to realize is that an athlete’s mental outlook and stress response during the physical rehabilitation process significantly impacts both the recovery process and the risk of reinjury. Using sport psychology techniques to supplement your physical therapy process will result in more motivation, improved communication with your physical therapist, a better understanding of your injury, increased control over your recovery process, and ultimately a reduction in injury susceptibility.
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Breaking Down Team Cohesion
In sports team cohesion is the tendency for a group of athletes to remain united in pursuit of team goals in the face of adversity.
Carron & Hausenblas (1998) offer a conceptual framework for team cohesion that includes the environment (i.e., group size), leadership (both peer and coaching behavior), team (i.e., roles), and personal factors (i.e., satisfaction). This framework is based upon Carron’s (1985) two principles of group integration and the individual’s attractive to the group (Burke et al., 2014). The principle of group integration is the concept that each athlete has a unique perspective about the closeness or bondedness of the team (Burke et al., 2014). The concept of an individual’s attractive to the group reflects the athlete’s personal benefits of being on the team or how each athlete’s individual needs are being met by other team members throughout the course of a season (Burke et al., 2014).
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What does it mean to take an Internal Family Systems (IFS) Approach?
Internal Family Systems (IFS), also known as “parts work”, is a mindfulness-based approach to self-acceptance and somatic awareness. IFS helps people navigate competition and life with the 8 Cs: confidence, calm, compassion, courage, creativity, clarity, curiosity, and connection. IFS has proven to be highly effective for quieting the inner-critic, resolving inner conflicts, and slowing emotional reactivity.
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How to Bounce Back from Adversity in Sports
To learn how to overcome defeat and bounce back from adversity in sports, it can be helpful to look back through history at the greatest athletes of all time.
History is full of stories about athletes that have been cut from teams, experienced heartbreaking losses, and devastating injuries. However because the focus is usually on the career highlights of the winners, the heroic stories of their persevering journeys are often missed.
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How to Stop Negative Self-Talk
Self-talk is one of the most powerful predictors of an athlete’s behavior and performance under pressure. How you speak to yourself matters. Self-talk impacts your emotions, behavior, and relationships. Developing awareness and control over your self-talk in pressure situations is an absolutely vital step on your path to optimal performance.
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Understand How Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Relationships
History of Attachment Theory
Attachment theory was first coined by a British psychologist and psychoanalyst named John Bowlby in the 1950s. Bowlby studied the emotional, developmental, and cognitive impact of separation between infants and their primary caregivers. According to Bowlby’s theory, children look to their primary caregivers when they are in need and how the caregiver response impacts their child’s emotional development.
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