Pressure inurement training: how sports coaches build resilience in their athletes.

Jack Harrison
Dec 19, 2019
9 min read

Updated: Dec 30, 2019

The purpose of this blog is for sports coaches to understand:

-The importance of athletes developing resilience for wellbeing and not just performance.

· The influence a facilitative environment has on enhancing resilience.

· How to use resilience building techniques in coaching practice.

The quote above illustrates the mindset of high-performance athletes. Winning and losing defines their lives. Jobs, further funding and reputation are on the line for most performers every time they step out into competition. Considering how close a victory or defeat can really be, a season can be undone with one last minute goal or four years of hard work for an Olympics can be determined by a hundredth of a second, the impact on mental health can be a fine balance, leading to athletes being anxious of failure (1,2,3,4). Add in pressure from the media, stress from personal life and other aspects of life, a career in top end sport can be potentially overwhelming (14).

To cope with the demands of the environment, high end athletes must develop resilience (5,6). Resilience is the ability to adapt to stress and maintain performance and wellbeing whilst doing so (7,8). When a stressful event occurs, a resilient individual will overcome the obstacle without avoiding it, as this can produce less desirable behaviours (4,8).

Resilience is the ability to adapt to stress and maintain performance and wellbeing whilst doing so (7,8).

Performance over wellbeing

Having a win at all costs mindset can be excellent for performance and achievement (11) however, there can be negative effects to mental health (12). The motivation most high level athletes have can bring out a drive, persistence and ruthlessness that is desirable in their sporting world, however in the social world are less acceptable (13). Ill health can come from the repetitive hard work of trying to achieve, and can take over the athletes thought processes into all walks of life (14,15). Athletes are exposed to challenging themselves and constantly pushing their limitations both physically and mentally (16,9) plus the unrelenting high expectation, high challenge and high pressure, day in day out can severely test the resources of any athlete (11,9).

Recently there has been examples of this in the most successful athletes. The most decorated Olympian ever, Michael Phelps, one of the most successful rugby players ever Jonny Wilkinson and the greatest cyclist ever Lance Armstrong have all opened up about their battles with their mental health problems since retiring. All three of these sport stars had a drive in them that has been much celebrated by the general public, however this led to Phelps and Wilkinson developing depression and Armstrong to use performance enhancing drugs due to the need to perform outweighed their wellbeing. It is important to remember that all of the aforementioned mental health issues may not have come as a direct consequence of the sporting environment they are in (14). Stress can emerge from all areas of life, that can add to the stress from sport which negatively effects mental health (14,24).

The sporting world can be highly demanding and push athletes to breaking point (11,6). The majority of elite athletes have found it difficult to open up about their weaknesses, in order to preserve their strong image to the rest of the world, even though they are more at risk of developing poor mental health most of the rest of the population (17). This therefore is a problem that needs addressing, athletes need may well experience many low points in their career and they need the necessary support to be able to deal with it and feel comfortable enough to talk when they do so (13). A proactive facilitative environment, where people can make mistakes and learn from them whilst being fully supported towards potentially stressful situations is important to maintain functioning for wellbeing and performance (13).

What does this mean for sports coaches?

A recent duty of care in sport review by the UK government (19) has promoted the need for mental welfare in sport across the many levels of sport. With wellbeing and mental health being ‘a major concern’ in sport has led to calls for sport coaches being more aware of the environment they create to foster a greater care. Specifically, the review states athletes on a high performance pathway need to develop resilience for the demands of the pressurised environments. Even stating that psychological resilience should be developed as much as physical resilience.

The sports coach has a major influence of the sporting environment their athlete will experience (20). Other relationships such as other players and support staff can also influence how people build resilience (21); it is important for a sports coach therefore to create a culture for their athletes to build resilience to stress that will enhance performance and wellbeing (16).

Building resilience

Everyone has the potential to become more resilient, it has been shown across many different domains using an array or different techniques (23, 24). In sport, there have been occasions where coaches take their athletes into a different environments to be put under more stress. For example, England’s 1999 Rugby squad spent time with the army, before the world cup. Whilst it does have some relevance to helping the team develop a way to deal with stress, sports coaches need a more practical way to involve resilience building techniques in their practice. With this in mind, Fletcher and Sarkar, (2016), created mental fortitude training. The training is split into three different sections: personal qualities, facilitative environment and challenge mindset.

The next part of the blog will briefly outline factors that allow athletes to build resilience in sport (personal qualities and challenge mindset) and will explore how to create a facilitative environment in more depth.

1) Personal qualities

Personal qualities begin with the personality characteristics of the athlete that are linked to resilient behaviours. These are deep rooted attributes that do have the capacity to change over time (16). Resilient characteristics has been linked with many psychological qualities such as self-confidence, hardiness, and optimism (26,27). Each individual has different levels of qualities, some qualities will need to be developed and others maintained. For this to happen, psychological skills such as self-talk, imagery, and goal setting, must be used (16). Once this process happens then desirable resilient behaviours occur (16). These are all influenced by stressors and adversity negatively and the social and environmental resources positively (16).

2) Facilitative environment

The personal qualities of an athlete can be influenced by the environment they are a part of, therefore the next part of mental fortitude training focuses on creating the right environment for athletes to develop their personal qualities, this is known as a facilitative environment (16). It is here that sport coaches have a significant increase of control on their athlete’s development of resilience.

A facilitative environment allows athletes to have times that they feel less resilient that normal, however the culture lets people to learn from it, rather than dismiss it (16). Low points can be a highly effective way to learn and progress as a person and a performer, it must be encouraged to speak up about these feelings and coaches must help athletes overcome this (13).

The balance of challenge and support creates a facilitative environment (16). The coach can challenge their athletes having high expectations and pushing them out of their comfort zone. This needs to be balanced with support, allowing athletes to practice their personal qualities in a suitable environment to allow learning.

The balance of challenge and support will determine whether the athlete is working in an unrelenting environment (high challenge, low support), comfortable environment (low challenge, high support) and stagnant environment (low challenge, low support). All of which will have a harmful effect on either performance or the wellbeing of the athlete, therefore it is important to get the balance right (16).

How to support performance and wellbeing using pressure inurement training

Now the basis of what a facilitative environment has been shown, it is important sports coaches know to create this environment for their athletes. Pressure inurement training has been created from many different resilience training programmes for a practical and effective method for coaches to build resilience in practice (16). The training is based on using challenge and support equally, to create a facilitative environment.

Guide for coaches to add to session plan:

Using these guidelines, below is an example a coach could use for an individual basketball player who is stressed about 3-point shots due to losing concentration because of the crowd.

Sports coaches in charge of a team sport must understand that everyone reacts to stress differently. All athletes have differing levels of resilience, therefore certain players will need to be challenged further as the demands of their environment may not be enough. On the other hand, other players may be challenged enough by the environment and require more support, therefore it is important to continuously balance this throughout the practice.

To illustrate this, below is an example of a football team that find it hard to get a result out of a game when they are behind in the last 10 minutes, they usually get frustrated with each other and fail to create chances because of this. Also, player A is a highly resilient player that need the environment more demanding. Player B is less resilient and needs to become more confident in these situations.

3) Challenge mindset.

With personal qualities maximised by good psychological skills, in an environment that allows the opportunity for resilience to be developed alongside the required amount of support also, then this will influence the athlete’s challenge appraisal. This is where an athlete views stress in a different light, they see stress as a chance to grow further, rather than it being debilitating to performance and health. Thought patterns are not necessarily positive all the time, they may also be productive (16).

"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters"- Epictetus.

Key messages

-Sport can be a matter of life and death to a lot of people involved with it, therefore it is important that to manage the highs and lows, people build resilience to stress to reduce the chance of poor mental health.

-Sports coaches have a duty of care to allow their athletes to build resilience.

-Balancing challenge and support into drills is how to build resilience

-Creating a safe environment for people to talk about weaknesses allows people to learn how to become resilient.

-Building resilience can allow for athletes to have a balanced life between performance and wellbeing

Reference list

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