perceived effort
I cut/pasted some 'talking points' for tonights High Performance practice. I thought I would share with the Team. I put these types of thoughts down from books I have read, blogs, etc. I use them to spark ideas and building my own thoughts to share and teach. Most are from the book 'How Bad Do You Want it' by Matt Fitzgerald. HIGHLY recomend this book.
What endurance athletes must endure above all is not actual effort, but perception of effort. Perceived effort is essentially the body's resistance to the mind's will. The fitter an athlete becomes, the less resistance the body puts up. therefore, increased physical capacity is always felt.
- An athlete’s perception of effort, as opposed to physical limitations, is the ultimate limit on athletic performance.
- The ability to withstand increased perception of effort can be trained, just like physical capacity.
- Some interventions can reduce the perception of effort - as the limit of perceived effort moves to a new place, the physical performance is increased.
- The maximum level of perceived effort an athlete is willing/able to tolerate depends on their motivations for doing so.
What I take from all this is the following:
- Don’t listen to the voice telling you to slow down. Push through as you have physical capacity to spare.
- Prepare yourself for high perceived effort, and understand your motivations for tolerating it, and your coping skills to reduce it.
- When training, especially in harder sessions, we are building mental fitness to tolerate perceived effort as well as building physical capacity. READ THIS AGAIN, OUTLOUD. IN A MIRROR, UNDERSTAND IT.
• Setting time based goals that stretch you just beyond past limits – they must be both difficult and realistic;
• The group effect – endurance athletes perceive less effort and perform better when training and racing cooperatively rather than alone;
• Achieving a state of flow i.e. complete immersion in a purposeful activity, a unity with one’s effort during which an athlete experiences a lower rating of perceived effort;
• Racing in the moment – caring a little less about the result of a race; and WORKING THE NOW.
• Having a passion for the sport and finding personal meaning in the sport which serves as motivation
1) Embrace the pain. (Embrace the suck) The more discomfort you expect, the more you can tolerate:
The Athlete Perspective:
If an athlete says, “this is going to hurt!” They are far more likely to deal with the pain and push on, than if they say something like “I hope this doesn’t hurt as much as last time.”
If they accept and commit to how hard it’s going to be or how bad it’s going to hurt, then performance increases around 15% and perceived effort reduces by around 55%.
Olympian Peter VanderKaay - 'It is going to hurt, bad no matter if you swim fast or you swim slow, so if it is going to hurt regardless, might as well swim FAST and hurt...
Our Daily Perspective:
Knowing our obstacles and accepting that things are going to be hard is paramount to being able to consistently exert self-control. If I am going to work on a big project today, and I usually procrastinate, I am better off saying, “Ok, I’m probably going to want to procrastinate and it’s going to be hard to get started.” Instead, most people ignore the fact that this is going to happen and hope for motivation.
2) ‘Do Your Best’ doesn’t lead to your best
The Athlete Perspective:
In study after study, athletes perform a test (for example, a strength test) and then undergo a period of training to try to improve that test. If one group is given a goal, but the other group is told just to ‘do your best,’ then the group with the goal performs significantly better in the re-test than the others. Even though they do exactly the same training program.
Our Daily Perspective:
I can obviously talk about goals here, but that seems too simple. Instead, this has a direct correlation to people who plan their day, vs those who don’t. When we plan our day, we set mini goals throughout the day of the things we want to achieve. When we start the day to just ‘do our best’ we often end up meandering through the hours and then we get on the bus to go home and think, ‘did I actually get anything done?’
3) Positive Feedback works….. even if it’s BS. This one was interesting!
The Athlete Perspective:
Two groups participated in a skills task. One group got positive feedback from some ‘expert coaches’ (the coaches weren’t actually experts, and the positive feedback was random…. It wasn’t even for good execution), while the other group got no feedback at all.
The positive feedback group got better and better at the skills task as they went on, whereas the other group did not improve at all.
Sum it all up:
Steve Prefontaine.
Why run is a question often asked. Why go out there every afternoon and beat out your brains? What is the logic of punishing yourself each day, of striving to become better, more efficient, tougher? The value in it is what you learn about yourself. In this sort of situation all kinds of qualities come out -- things that you may not have seen in yourself before
“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” — Steve Prefontaine
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” — Confucius
