What are the mental performance skills endurance athletes need?
Here Coach Philip looks at the psychological makeup of endurance athletes and goes under the hood to find out what makes higher performers successful. Often athletes talk about mental toughness and the ability to “griz” it out. Though these are both admirable qualities, are they actually the main focus, or is there more to it than a tolerance or enjoyment of self-inflicted endurance?
Often, athletes look to train more or train harder to find their next edge to improve their times or go beyond a plateau. For some, this is just the natural progression from what they have known in their earlier days as an athlete. When you first start, you learn that doing three swims, not two, actually improves your performance. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail about why that is. Instead, recognise that this is a learned relationship: more equals better.
As an athlete begins to mature in their training approaches, brute force and ignorance provides diminishing returns. Therefore, we have to review how we train. Mark Bellamy, our sports Psychologist, talks about the following five performance skills:
Season planning – Does the season make sense: does our season facilitate what we want to do?
Training Skills – Is the training appropriate, and are you approaching it appropriately?
Recovery Skills – This is where the magic happens; how are you enhancing that recovery?
Competition Skills – The skills around performance (often these are the ones that we all hear about) but they are the tip of the iceberg: you can't focus on self-talk if you haven't got many of the other things in place
Competition preparation skills – Are we preparing for the event psychologically beforehand? What works for each person?
You can check out our YouTube Playlist for more detail on all of these areas.
The other two skills that we would look into as endurance athletes (aside from their sport) are patience and personal athletic responsibility.
Patience is something that we come back to time and time again as coaches. In a world where we are used to immediate results, endurance training is just not one of them. It seems to be something that athletes can sometimes forget. Patience is one of the most important performance skills that umbrellas above training, sessions, racing and recovery. Being good at endurance takes time; it builds year over year. Equally, racing demands the athlete to be focused on their task at hand and not get carried away by racing in the first half of the race. As any long term endurance athlete will point out, focussing on the long-term plan and building through the event are critical to your success.
Additionally, an athlete should possess and implement personal athletic responsibility. At the sharpest end, you may hear sports people talking about "just not being good enough". In other words, they don't try and blame externally; rather, they look internally at what they can improve. However, in a day to day matter, it would look more like spending the extra 5 minutes before a workout to activate and warm up appropriately for them. It is about taking the time to consistently deliver your best session, best training weeks and facilitate your performance gains. This may look like good personal time management to others, but for those doing, it is about doing the session right, not just ticking it off. Furthermore, it may be about additional recovery or stretching, and physio drills work that you need to do. It goes beyond doing the sessions; it is about understanding the purpose and seeing the full 360-degree picture of training. It is all about the performance lifestyle and creating an environment that facilitates it.
From a coaching perspective, this enables 'higher-level' coaching conversations and enables better performances. It isn’t just about your watts or your pace, but looking at your whole lifestyle to deliver a performance day in, day out.
In summary, the big improvement you can make in improving the performance skills is taking your training and going beyond passively "executing the plan" Rather, it goes to the point of understanding how to actively engage with the plan. How will you make your steps towards improved mental performance?
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has have coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
Visit Philip's
Coach profile
We’re here to help
Tri Training Harder are one of the leading Triathlon coaching providers in the UK, using our wealth of experience to unite scientific and technological research with already well-established and successful best practices, to create a formula for triathlon and endurance coaching that works.
The result is an honest, dynamic, yet simple new way of constructing an athlete’s training to allow them to reach their potential.
If you’re planning your next season, just starting out in the sport or are looking for extra guidance at the very top end of the field, we are here to help, and our coaches would be delighted to hear from you. You can contact us via the website, and one of the team will be in touch.