Coaches Ask a Sport Psych, Episode 11, Understanding Seasonal Mental Resets in Training
I'm excited to bring you the twelfth episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're addressing a question about recommended seasonal mental resets:
"How many per year, how long from a training perspective, and what are the signs and symptoms that an athlete needs to reset?"
In this episode, I discuss how to determine the optimal timing and duration for mental resets in athletic training, and how to recognize when an athlete might benefit from one. Join me as we explore strategies to keep athletes performing at their best throughout the season.
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Edited Video Transcript:
The question asked today has to do with recommended seasonal mental resets. The coach asks:
"How many per year, how long from a training perspective, and what are the signs and symptoms that an athlete needs to reset?"
The maybe disappointing answer to that first question—how many per year and how long from a training perspective—is: it depends.
Just because one person performs really, really effectively having one long break in a year—maybe over a holiday season or an inclement period where training is just not very effective—doesn't guarantee that that's going to transfer to anybody else. So engaging in that iterative process of working with your clients to find, like, "When my clients take breaks, breaks of this duration seem to be beneficial, whereas breaks of that duration seem not to be," that'll help you narrow in the answer to how long for that person from a training perspective.
As far as how many, again, through trial and error, through an empirical process, you're going to see clients where they go on an extended training block or an extended competition block, and they do just fine with a little bit of rest, and they're feeling great. And you're going to find other clients where an extended training or extended competition block without rest is like crash-and-burn season—they're not going to make it through either the training or competition or both. And so, salting in rest here and there is the more effective thing for that athlete.
So how many, how long—it depends with each athlete. Try different things out, take advantage of scheduled disruptions to see how that affects them from a rest perspective, and explore it.
Signs and symptoms that an athlete may need to reset:
The biggest ones are very similar to signs and symptoms of needing rest on a day-to-day basis—signs of fatigue. A lot of times, when we are particularly fatigued physically or mentally, we have a tendency to get into repetitive patterns. That's when we're doing the same thing over and over and over again, and stuff isn't changing.
We've moved from this process of evolution and escalation in training to just the same number of reps, same power levels, same route—stuck in repetition. Repetition is very useful when it comes to training, but when you start to notice that it's more repetitive, less varied, and there's not really effective results coming from it, that's probably an indicator that a reset is needed.
Similarly, verbal behavior—if you have your clients journaling or if you have a regular call with them, and you're seeing that the words coming out of their mouth or the conversational patterns you're having with them suddenly become very constrained in what they're saying, how they're saying it, how they're responding—like you're running around on a racetrack—that might be a strong indicator that it's time to take a break, introduce some variability, get some rest of some sort, and see if on the back end you get a wider range.
Ultimately, when it comes to training, practice, and rest, some degree of variation is really, really beneficial for athletes. When we get particularly fatigued, mentally or physically, we restrict our variation—we start to fall back into the patterns that have been beneficial for us in the past, and we start to work that same one rut. So that move from variation to repetition can usually be an indicator that rest will be really beneficial at that point.