Prepare NOT to choke on game day

If you’re a competitive athlete, you know what it is to choke. Double faulting on match point.  Missing a layup in the final seconds.  Sending a penalty kick over the crossbar.

But when is an error a choke and when it is, OMG, just human error?  After all, Michael Jordan often notes that he missed many times when assigned to take the game-winning basket.  

Click to read a great article that gives a different frame for looking at choking – at least it did for me.  Written by Noah Gentner, a Canadian sports psychologist, it points out that choking is defined by the outcome: losing.  Well, yeah, I never heard of someone being accused of choking because s/he won.  

Because choking is always equated with failure to win, it makes it hard to differentiate many times from simple human imperfection.  Most competitors can recognize when they lost because their opponent was superior, at least that day.  Much harder to recognize is whether losing is due to your own failure -- an off day, poor conditioning, choking, whatever.

Gentner argues that choking is a result of poor preparation, and he gives several tips for how to condition yourself mentally so that you don't choke when the big game comes.

Longer warm-up can mitigate age-related issues

How long do you warm up before exercise or playing – 5 minutes?  Maybe even 10?  You may well be an injury waiting to happen.

If you’re like me, you hit the tennis ball around for 8 to 10 minutes – not always gently – before starting a game.  That’s woefully inadequate even though it’s more than some other athletes.  Research shows that the great majority of golfers, for instance, warm up for less than 5 minutes before taking their first swing and many for less than one minute.

An article from 2009 in the American College of Sports Medicine’s journal is worth reading to understand how warm-up helps offset the effect of various age-related physical declines.  As it noted, “the aging athlete has muscles that have a slower speed of contraction …, tendency toward tightness in the connective tissues, reduced motor coordination, and a general decline in the total capacity and initial responsiveness of the cardiorespiratory system at the start of exercise.”

Just two examples, from the article, of how adequate warm-up can mitigate the impact of such things:

§         Weight bearing activity throughout the warm-up facilitates diffusion of lubricating fluid into joint space – so your joints work better.

§         General body warm-up increases blood flow to the brain, which enhances alertness and cognitive function – so you react faster.

Skimping on warm-up is an error people make when they are simply working out, too.  I thought I was doing it right by hitting the treadmill and rowing machine for 5 minutes before working out.  Then my 31-year-old trainer – a former Olympic-class wrestler and coach of a national team – told me he warms up for 20 minutes before an every-day workout.  

I’d love to hear what others are doing for their warm-ups, so please share!

PS  Golfers: that journal article included lots of great research-based information on golf and how warm-up can specifically improve your game and help prevent injury.

Rehab, fitness or play -- exercising appropriately

I heard an interesting idea recently from Dr. Robert Nirschl when I interviewed him in connection with the Washington Post article.  Many of you’ve probably been treated by Nirschl, the Arlington-based osteopathic surgeon known for treating a range of Wimbledon champions from Stan Smith in the 1970’s to Richard Krajicek 30 years later.

Nirschl was making the point that there are different kinds of exercise and reiterated the point many of us forget: you have to condition your body before you play your sport competitively.  He said he sees three categories of exercise:

1. Medical rehabilitation: moving from an abnormal condition to a normal one. In other words, restoring an injured body part to normal function.
2. Fitness exercise: moving from normal function to a better level of normal functioning.
3. Performance exercise: moving from the level of better normal to the exceptional level needed to play a sport competitively.

I find myself going back to Nirschl’s framework in assessing where my body – or various parts it – are at any particular time, especially when recovering from an injury.  Not only does it help keep me focused on the slow re-building of an injured part but it reminds me that the rest of the body is still healthy enough to be exercised.

Pre-Play Stretching Not a Problem

To stretch or not to stretch, that is (always) the question it seems. 

Recently, some folks have said that stretching before you play your sport actually is detrimental not helpful.  Seems some studies indicated that pre-performance stretching reduces an athlete’s ability to do power moves – leaping for an overhead or sprinting to first base, for instance. Nah, it doesn’t seem to be so – unless you hold the stretch for longer than 60 seconds, in which case you probably aren’t hot to play anyhow.

That’s the conclusion of research about to be published in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.  The research studied more than 100 previous studies of the subject. 

You have to wonder about the validity of stretching research, though.  To find the 100 research projects that had usable findings, the researchers culled from more than 4500 possible articles.