Every 4 years, athletes from across the globe look to make their dreams of becoming an Olympic champion reality. This often rests on one chance to show the world what they have been working on their whole lives. Imagine the pressure of knowing this could define your life’s dedication. For some, this pressure is debilitating, […]
“Difficulties in life are intended to make us better, not bitter.” – Dan Reeves (Former NFL athlete and head coach) Resilience. It has become a buzzword of modern self-help inside and out of the sporting world. It is touted as necessary for success; but has been criticised heavily for the use of ill-defined terminology and unqualified results. The term […]
The purpose of this article is to outline the concept of mental toughness amongst runners in a marathon with the use of mental skills. Mental toughness associates to the ability of coping under pressure with self-belief and focus. One can assume that mental toughness in marathon runners would be important given its duration. Performers can […]
Rugby union is a dynamic collision team sport requiring the coordination of various team positions and roles, where players are frequently required to move seamlessly between offensive and defensive situations. The structural and strategic aspects of playing rugby place extensive demands on a rugby team’s resilience [1]. Team resilience is defined as a “dynamic, psychosocial […]
In March 2015, Leicester City Football Club were facing relegation from the Premier League and embarked on what commonly became known as ‘The Great Escape’. Fast forward 14 months and Leicester City had overcome 5000-1 odds to win the Premier League in 2015-16. For every football fan, this fairy-tale story made Premier League history, with […]
“Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.” – William Arthur Ward. A challenge mindset has long been associated with improved sports performance. However, it is only recently that research has suggested that developing this mindset is one of the keys to building psychological resilience in an athlete1. Put simply, resilience differentiates the […]
In our latest podcast we talk to Dr Mustafa Sarkar about growth, adversity and how athletes and coaches can develop resilience in sport.
“The lads showed great resilience today, they just never gave up”. How many times have you heard this, or something similar, regurgitated by coaches in a post-match press conference? Is resilience simply “not giving up” or does it have a deeper meaning? And just how can the military help athletes develop resilience? Do you know […]
Resilience is a hot topic in today’s world. From sport psychology to military psychology, it seems that everyone has their own interpretation of resilience, and how resilience training should be administered. Going back to my previous article titled “Empirical vs. Non-empirical Resilience Strategies – Outcomes and Consequences,” resilience will be defined as: …one’s ability to […]
What is resilience? Resilience is your ability to adapt to and overcome negative emotional responses in a given situation. Or is it? A general academic/peer-reviewed search of resilience results in hundreds of thousands of articles. Results are even higher among non-peer-reviewed articles. So which one has the true definition of resilience? The answer varies. In […]