Why Sport Is Mentally Challenging
Often sports fans think that sport at the highest level is physically draining but it’s the minds of the athletes that need to be looked after even more than their bodies are
Every sport is mental.
That may seem ironic because sports are so physical but it’s true.
There’s no doubt that people play sport with their bodies but it’s their minds that decide to play the game in the first place. And it’s their mind that pushes them to continue playing throughout their sporting career.
Choosing one sport over another in being the most mentally challenging is difficult because each sport has its pitfalls and when you take these drawbacks in their context it’s difficult to measure them against one another.
As an example take water sports in comparison to field sports.
Swimming is a very different sport from football.
Often swimmers wake extra early in the morning and train for a couple of hours in the pool whereas footballers may still be in bed. Yet footballers go into physical contact and can suffer physical contact injuries that swimmers never have.
Professional tennis players use their bodies in a series of movements going from side to side and this can produce a lot of wear and tear and stress on their bodies. And as they travel a lot by themselves they are left with these stresses alone in their mind while they contemplate how to play well in the next tournament. Golfers too spend a lot of time alone in their hotel rooms as they try to mentally plan their assault on individual golf courses that change each time they play different tournaments.
The comparisons and challenges of each sport are endless.
Then there are commonalities too.
Because each sportsperson has usually played their sport since they were young and somewhere along the line have had hopes and dreams of making it to the highest level. But not everyone makes it to the professional level of the sport.
In fact, the vast majority fail.
And when a young athlete fails to make the elite level it can hurt them. Because many of them have planned their whole lives around playing in professional sport and by the time they get to their early twenties and discover they are not going to make it there it can have a hugely negative impact on them. And that’s when their minds have to be strong to react and change of direction in life.
Then there are the sacrifices that players make.
When growing up top players often miss out on important family occasions. I’ve known top sportspeople who have missed their brothers or sisters’ religious rites of passages simply because they were training or at practice. Others have gone home to bed early during a family wedding and missed the celebration of something monumental in their family’s or friend’s lives simply because they needed to keep to a strict sleep pattern.
All of these things weigh on athlete’s minds and show the sacrifice most make if only to compete at the elite level.
And in all sports, you need to be mentally tough to defeat the opposition.
There are no two ways about it. You have to outwit your opponent at times and that means doing your homework on them and knowing their strengths and weaknesses.
Because if you want to get one over on them you have to see where the opportunities lie to exploit their game. And that takes mental preparation. You need to slow down and study the opposition properly to establish how they are going to play and how to the best of your advantage you can play against them.
You need to be self-disciplined to get fit, to practice, and to keep fit and injury free over a long period.
And that takes self-control. Not every top athlete has this because some can struggle with their diet, their times of sleep, how they treat their bodies during injury, and even something as simple as being alone a lot of the time.
As an athlete, you need to critically analyze yourself and see where you went wrong. This is pivotal if you are playing an individual sport because otherwise if you don’t get to the bottom of one bad performance your next performance could start to create a rot.
In team sports, it’s not that easy either.
Even though you`re a team player it’s not nice to have to stand up to the criticism that one bad performance can bring. Often team players have to sit in a team meeting and be blamed for something that went wrong in a planned performance when the team management shows a recorded video of the incident to all of the team. This can be grueling and can be tough for a player to take.
So being a top athlete or professional player of any sport is mentally challenging.
And it’s not only your body that you must take care of.
Because once the final whistle goes in a sporting career there is a life outside of sport and that’s where many struggles to fit back into as they’ve not been concerned with ordinary life for so long and that’s when their body has gotten that bit older also.
It’s then that they need to heed the old saying of:
“Mind over matter”
Because it offers great wisdom for the next big chapter for a retired athlete’s life.
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