Mental toughness is something everyone talks about in sport. But what is it? Mental toughness is the capacity of an athlete to do their job – i.e. to do the things they’ve trained to do – no matter what happens to them or what’s happening around them. Once you understand what mental toughness is – the good news is – you can coach it.
Start talking about mental toughness in sport and you’ll soon find out that everyone’s got an opinion about it. People will start using words like “hard” and “tough” and “mean” and phrases like “never quits” etc to describe their views about mental toughness. But what is mental toughness? Can it be measured? Can it coached? And if mental toughness can be coached, how can it be coached? This post and podcast discuss mental toughness in sport and suggests a new way of looking at measuring and coaching mental toughness.
Have you ever sat around and wondered why you didn’t win that race? Or even pondered how come you didn’t win the big game? Guess what……in a lot of cases the reason why you didn’t win was that you didn’t prepare to win. The fundamental reason you train is to prepare to meet the challenges and demands of every competitive situation you find yourself in. To do less, is to prepare to fail. This article discusses the concept of winning and explains why it is essential that your training must be tougher than the competition you are preparing for.