Sports psychology helps to maximise an athlete’s performance

Coach Minna Marsh says mental coaching and self-esteem training has been rendered too difficult in Finland

Minna Marsh

Kaisa Mäkäräinen

Mikko Korhonen

Kaisa Nieminen

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By Riitta Koivuranta
     
      The dancers extend their ankles perfectly and take tiny steps forward en pointe while holding their supple bodies up in a graceful pose.
      So beautiful, delicate, and so light. This is exactly what classical ballet should look like - easy.
      At the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki the National Ballet School’s young dancers are rehearsing the choreography for a production of Alice in Wonderland.
      “For a dancer, a tough performance like this is a huge physical and emotional effort that requires extreme concentration, endurance, and mental agility”, says mental coach and stress management trainer Minna Marsh.
      Exactly the same applies to competitive sports.
     
In Finland, the significance and necessity of sports psychology raises hackles and debate every time after any of the country’s sporting heroes underperforms - as they do with unnerving regularity - at an important international sporting meet like the World Championships or the Olympics, or in the case of our footballers, at a crucial must-win qualifying game.
      A recent case in point, though the examples are legion, was the Finnish ice hockey team at the World Junior Championships a week or so back, who conspired to lose in overtime to Russia in the quarter-finals despite enjoying a 3-1 lead with four minutes left on the clock.
     
How was it that they choked, just when they should have been turning in a personal best or playing out of their skins?
      Is it a mind thing, or is that just mumbo-jumbo?
      The significance of psychological prepping and coaching is recognised, but there is still an inertia there - somehow the development of one’s mental strength continues to be overlooked in training.
      “Mental mentoring should be a natural and direct part of everyday life and sports. These things have been made too difficult here”, Marsh charges.
      “It is not a question of someone being messed up in the head. It is merely about adding strength and additional advantage to one’s competitive urge and development.”
     

When an athlete or a team fails to deliver in an important competition it is easy to place the blame on the mental side. Of course the problem is not located every time between the athlete’s ears, but quite often it is.
      The coaching provided by Marsh, who has worked especially with ice hockey players, includes several exercises that help the athlete to analyse his or her immediate situation.
      In practice Marsh helps an athlete to understand how the human mind works, how emotions have a direct effect on one’s actions and results.
      One session with Marsh lasts for ninety minutes. Often several sessions are required, but sometimes results can be achieved quickly.
     
The worlds of dance and sports involve a lot of having to prove something.
      “The world of ballet is extremely demanding, because it aims for reaching one’s personal perfection. Often ballet dancers have self-esteem challenges and pressures relating to their body image”, Marsh describes.
      For reasons such as these, a ballet dancer should receive psychological coaching already at an early age in order to bear up later on against the tough competition that exists for roles in the professional world.
     
Athletes usually ask Marsh for help in issues relating to competition nerves, self-esteem problems, and loss of motivation.
      “Often people only contact me when the deadlock situation is already quite severe.”
      The comment is backed up by the numbers: a survey on coaching carried out last year by the Finnish Psychological Association revealed that of 86 respondents, top athletes coming from a variety of different sports, only 26 per cent had experience of regular psychological conditioning and coaching.
      Conversely, 53 per cent had no experience of any kind of coaching of this type.
     
Basically, "the shrink is called in" when things have already started to unravel and times and performances have suffered as a result.
      When an athlete’s mental strip begins to come apart at the seams, pressures become intolerable and stress management fails.
      “What causes the sense of control to disappear is what one thinks about”, Marsh states.
      “If an athlete manages to equip himself with as strong and healthy self-esteem as possible, all these other issues can be written off with relative ease. Self-esteem is something we can develop and control.”
     
According to Marsh, the mental coaching classes organised by sports federations and other bodies are often all too theoretical, leaving the athletes unable to apply the information they have gleaned to their own training and competing.
      “According to some athletes, certain events have included 'as a filler' a short introduction to psychological coaching, but this has left the athletes with nothing particularly concrete to take home with them“, laments Marsh.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 14.1.2011


Links:
  Sports Psychology (Wikipedia)
  Minna Marsh website

RIITTA KOIVURANTA / Helsingin Sanomat
riitta.koivuranta@hs.fi