Mental Toughness: What is it?
Is mental toughness the difference between winning and losing?
Mental toughness has always intrigued me. I’ve always wondered how much we influence our mental toughness on a daily, weekly, monthly and even yearly basis. How much is genetic and how much is nurtured? At what point does mental toughness take over or loose out to our bodies physiology? These are all questions I've thought about.
In sport the winner is often the result of who can throw faster, jump higher, who has more red blood cells, has more fast muscle twitch fibres, who can hold the largest amount of power over a period of time, who can react faster, who has greater control over their body; the list goes on. So at what point does our physiological capabilities and our mental toughness cross over?
Mental toughness means different things to different people. Could it be as simple as this: if you have two evenly matched athletes the one who want’s it more or who can put themselves through the most pain will win? Paula Radcliffe was very well known for her ability to handle pain. She once said that whilst running to a track training session as a junior she hadn't noticed her spikes had been digging into her until she reached the track and found the damage it had caused. Are some people so focused mentally that they are able to block out pain? I'm personaly under the opinion that at the elite level mental toughness and pain thresholds will be much of the same between athletes. Having said that can it be trained? Do elite athletes have a higher mental toughness because they have developed it over years of training? Can mental toughness even be measured?
Training might be one of the keys to mental toughness. How far can training take you before it comes down to sheer determination. Does daily training just train your bodies physiology or does it build a mental memory of completing session after session. During a competition do you recall what you have put your body through time and time again? I don’t think it makes racing any easier, I do think it shortens the time spent doubting yourself though. You realise you have a goal to achieve and must focus on it.
Is it therefore possible to train mental toughness? Do specific sessions actually increase your mental toughness to push through pain? Is it as simple as the difference between completing that last repetition and deciding not to? Is a lack of mental toughness simply being afraid of failure?Maybe it's simply consistently doing the same things over and over again so that when it comes down to that game winning shot the effort isn't making the shot, the effort was practicing the shot?
Can mental toughness be developed? I believe so. The knowledge we have of mental toughness is limited though. Do people give up when they are close to their physiological limit, because they are physiologically tired or mentally tired? Sport can come down to a split second, a footstep, a jump, a reaction or response to a competitor so what happens if your mental toughness is the difference between you making that ball a split second faster, jumping that little bit higher, responding that split second faster to another competitor? I ask myself these very questions a lot when training, particularly when pushing the pace. Can mental toughness be developed? I truly believe so and would put forward an argument that not only can it be training it can be continuously built upon. Based on this it would be possible to make daily decision to either increase or decrease your mental toughness and therefore I would conclude that the decisions you make in regards to when you train, how long you train and the intensity you train all contribute to your mental toughness.
I'm aware I haven't really answered what mental toughness actually is and that is because it really isn't that well understood. I've even put forward more questions than I have answered, but one again it's because we don't really know. What is apparent is that many great athletes elude to the mental battle of competition and training. Marathon runners are a great example who are known to make comments like 'A marathon is won mentally'. Other athletes elude to the mental toughness you need to put in the hours to train. Perhaps the basketball player who scores the last shot in the remaining seconds of the match doesn't want to win anymore than the next player, but maybe the mental toughness he showed by staying later than everyone else practicing that exact shot was the mental toughness that allowed him to score that final basket, winning the match. Just maybe then mental toughness is the difference between winning and losing, when the margin is simply consistency. If mental toughness is a product of effort and motivation then the definition I would like to leave this on is that mental toughness is simply being more consistent than other people.
