As an athlete looking for tips and advice on how to get to the next level in your sport, you might be missing out on a very powerful resource that could give you an edge over your competition.
You see, the typical athlete that I work with has a coach who has experience in that sport…great! Typical athlete also gets specific tutoring or classes in how to acquire certain skills. Also great!
Here’s where I think athletes are missing out. They ignore lessons and learning that can be had from OTHER sports.
For example. You may not really care about the sport of wrestling one bit but I’m here to tell you that athletes in that sport have made it a science in how to work out and train hard and cut weight (fat). Maybe you’re a football player and your coach has told you that you need to lose a few pounds around the middle in order to be quicker.
It’s no fun to restrict your diet but wrestler’s who make it develop a certain mindset that helps them deal with this and they take it to the nth degree. Research how they do it to gain tremendous efficiency in making it happen for you.
Or maybe you’re a volleyball player and you’ve had a few bad serves in a row and you’re in a slump about it. Well, no sport has to deal with performance slumps as much as baseball players and they also have studied this issue to death and have many solutions. Sometimes just hearing a quote or two from someone who has solved the problem is all you need.
This kind of out of the box thinking breaks you out of being stuck on a performance plateau.
Sure, you could get decent advice from someone in the volleyball world for how to deal with it but sometimes getting a fresh perspective outside of your sport can really unlock the brain that’s been blocked from a solution.
Maybe you play basketball and your coach is telling you that you have to be more aggressive. Can you think of a sport where aggressiveness is paramount? Hockey? Boxing? What if you just watched a few minutes of those sports and paid attention to the body posture and attitude of athletes in those sports and just modeled them? Maybe listen to a few interviews on youtube of athletes in those sports.
Having trouble with discipline for workouts and training? I would suggest learning a little something about swimmers. What kind of mental toughness does it take to get yourself out of bed at 4am and jump into cold water and endure the endless repetitive motions these athletes work on for hours a day, every day.
Are you in a sport where balance and footwork is important? Let me finish by giving you a secret training technique that I’ve found exrtremely effective AND from a sport you may not have even heard of…hacky sack or footbag!
Keep one of these in your pocket, they cost about $3. Just play around with keeping it in the air without using your hands. Keep trying to beat your personal record for amount of kicks. The great thing is that you can do it anywhere and it’s really fun! You will develop amazing balance and coordination.
Watch what pro hacky sackers can do!
Mental cross-training can be your secret weapon. Your competition doesn’t know this!
I’m Craig Sigl your mental toughness trainer.