Mental Toughness Training for Hockey Athletes
It’s late in the game and you need to make a play. You are fighting off a 6 on 4 with a championship at stake.
What is the make up of your team?
Will they be able to handle this adverse situation and prevail or will they crumble like a cookie and have the pressure get to them?
The most talented teams don’t always win, but rather it’s the teams that compete the hardest, play with great energy, enthusiasm, effort and encourage their teammates everyday.
They have the mental toughness that they won’t lose and will do everything in their power to succeed.
Mental toughness is having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to:
1. Generally cope better than your opponents with the many demands (e.g. competition, training, lifestyle) that are placed on you as a performer.
2. Specifically, to be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, focused, confident, resilient and in control under pressure.
The key psychological characteristics of mental toughness are:
1. Self-belief/Confidence
2. Focus
3. Motivation
4. Composure/Handling Pressure
Mental toughness is often thought of as an elusive quality that only the elite have possess but sport psychologists and coaches alike believe that it can be taught.
For the majority of people, consistent & intense physical exertion is the most accessible and common way to build mental toughness. They (athletes) believe in themselves more because they are accomplishing difficult tasks and doing things that they didn’t think were possible. This helps to build confidence, a positive attitude and a belief that they can handle themselves in any situation that arises.
We as coaches and trainers have to create an environment that creates and promotes mental toughness; which is teaching our athletes to do the right thing all the time.
The best time to create this environment is the post-season or early off-season.
This is the time of the year that you are looking to implement principles and build the foundation for next years team.
What will that foundation be built upon?
My initial concern in the post-season phase is how strong we are and what kind of shape we are in.
The goal is to build the foundation and set the base for what we are to become the following year – which is a team that focuses on doing the little things right, helps each other, encourages each other, has high expectation levels, doesn’t give up, and maintains a positive attitude day in and day out.
These are the intangible qualities that I’m looking to develop in my hockey athletes that better serve them as we enter into the off-season and start working towards the goals of a new season.
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