Chapter 8 – Relaxation and Energization 43
AROUSAL CONTROL WORKBOOK
MENTAL TRAINING FOR PEAK PERFORMANCE
Chapter 8
Relaxation & Energization – Draft 4
After reading this chapter, you should be able to
1. understand relaxation and energization and how they impact your daily life,
2. describe the benefits of relaxation and energization,
3. recount the role of diagnosis in creating opti-psych levels,
4. highlight criteria for selecting relaxation and energization strategies,
5. explain the experiential and scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of relaxation and energization skills for opti-psych control,
6. understand how Davidson and Schwartz’s comprehensive relaxation model provides a systematic approach for selecting relaxation techniques,
7. describe how the comprehensive energization model provides a scientific approach for selection of energization strategies,
8. highlight how athletes can develop awareness of their relaxation and energization levels and identify problem areas,
9. explain how to develop basic relaxation skills that are quick and effective,
10. identify ways to develop basic energization skills that athletes can employ successfully, and
11. understand how advanced skills can help athletes keep opti-psych skills sharp with a minimum of practice.
Understanding Relaxation
In this section, we will first discuss what relaxation is and how it can benefit you and your performance. Second, we’ll explain how diagnosis impacts relaxation effectiveness. Finally, we’ll acquaint you with some of the more common uses of relaxation in sport.
What Is Relaxation?
Relaxation is the ability to decrease unwanted muscular tension, reduce excessive autonomic activation, and calm the mind by eliminating unwanted thoughts. In this chapter we’ll focus on the development and use of the mental training tool of physical relaxation, whereas you will be taught basic mental relaxation skills in the next chapter when we discuss self-talk.
Diagnosis of Tension Problems
One of the strange findings in the stress management literature is that many individuals have more trouble diagnosing excessive tension than in getting rid of it using the stress management techniques at their disposal. Stress builds up gradually over time, whether the timeframe is hours, days, weeks or months. If diagnosed early while stress levels are low, most of us have the relaxation skills to generally reduce or eliminate tension, although often not quickly. Regrettably, many athletes and nonathletes alike have problems either recognizing their mounting stress levels or ignoring the warning signals until stress gets so high that it is difficult to handle, a point generally termed the threshold level (see Figure 8.1). Thus, stress creeps up over the course of the day, but as long as the tension remains below the threshold level, stress management skills can still effectively reduce or eliminate it. However, once athletes exceed their stress threshold, it becomes difficult for even the most skilled athletes to reduce this tension successfully. Thus, diagnosis is an important relaxation skill, identifying tension problems early when relaxation skills can still effectively eliminate the stress is essential to its success.
Now that you understand the importance of diagnosis, let’s examine some of the common uses for relaxation.
Uses of Relaxation
Physical relaxation is a flexible and versatile skills that has a variety of uses in sport, including:
· to better manage physical and psychological energy,
· to promote recovery from workouts and injuries,
· to think more clearly and keep things in better perspective,
· to allow athletes to sleep better, particularly before competition and/on the road,
· to increase enjoyment by reducing tension and stress, and
· to enhance performance by preventing tension in antagonistic muscles from interfering with smooth, fluid, well-timed movements.
Managing Physical and Psychological Energy
Athletes often fail to achieve their opti-psych level because they have excessive activation and are overly tense. Relaxation can help lower activation and reduce physical anxiety that may interfere with attaining the opti-psych level needed for top performance (see Chapter 11 on Energy Management). This use of relaxation will be discussed more fully later in the chapter when we describe our Competitive Opti-Psych Training Program.
Promotes Recovery from Workouts and Injuries
Each tough workout takes a toll on your body due to minor tissue damage to muscles, ligaments and tendons as well as accumulation of waste materials such as lactic acid in the muscles. Relaxation promotes muscle recovery which stimulates dilation of the blood vessels in order to supply greater amounts of oxygen to fatigued or injured muscles, speeding up the repair process and disposal of waste products. Just as a good “cool down” at the end of practice helps to maintain blood flow for waste removal and on-going repair efforts, relaxation can be extremely effective in continuing that process.
Think More Clearly
Relaxation can be helpful in enhancing the quality of your thinking on several levels. First, relaxation helps to reduce stress and other distractions that may interfere with effective thought processes. Second, relaxation helps to enhance focus and promotes greater concentration. Finally, greater blood flow should supply more oxygen to the brain, allowing your mind to function more efficiently, thus improving the quality of your problem-solving.
Sleep Better
Sleep is deeper, longer and more restful when you are relaxed. Athletes who have trouble getting a good night’s sleep frequently have problems with worry and stress. These problems become magnified the night before competition and/or when traveling. Normally athletes have trouble sleeping the night before a game because of high activation in the form of positive excitement or negative nervousness as well as extensive cognitive concerns, both the positive concerns about doing well and more negative fears related to failure. Taking the time to relax helps lower activation and reduce concerns, helping athletes to focus on the upcoming competition in a more positive way.
Increases Enjoyment
Performing while you’re tight or stressed is no fun, and relaxation can dramatically increase your enjoyment of sport by reducing muscular tension and negative autonomic arousal symptoms such as butterflies allowing you to focus more positively on achieving your goals.
Improve Performance By Reducing Antagonistic Tension
If you’ve ever seen a basketball player “air ball” a free throw in a crucial situation, you’ve seen direct evidence of the effects of excessive muscular tension in antagonistic muscles and their negative effects on performance. Because they can only contract, muscles that move joints are arranged in pairs so the first muscle can contract to prompt a specific movement, and its antagonistic muscle can then contract to return the joint to its original position. Under ideal conditions, these muscle pairs operate sequentially and not simultaneously. When a muscle tries to contract at the same time as its antagonistic counterpart, the effect is two muscles fighting each other rather than cooperating. Not only does movement lose its fluidity, rhythm and timing, but it also may be limited in its range of motion. Thus, the arm muscles of our tense free thrower are fighting each other so much that they lose all rhythm, touch timing and feel and fail to go through a full range of motion, resulting in a shot that is often several feet short of the basket. Although this is clearly one type of “choking,” its causes are more directly physical than mental. Relaxation can be effective in relaxing the antagonistic muscles so that movement patterns remain smooth, fluid, rhythmic and well-timed.
Uses of Energization
Energization is also a versatile skill that can be used in a variety of ways in sport, including:
· managing physical and psychological energy,
· enhancing concentration,
· elevating confidence, particularly for performing well when tired, encountering adversity or low energy levels.
· providing a performance advantage.
Managing Physical and Psychological Energy
Athletes often fail to achieve their opti-psych level because they are lethargic and under energized, particularly in practice situations or late in competitions. Energization can help raise activation levels that may interfere with attaining the opti-psych level needed for top performance. We’ll expand on this energization use later in the chapter when we describe our Competitive Opti-Psych Training Program.
Enhances Concentration
When your opti-psych level is too low, you tend to have too broad a level of attention and are easily distracted. As you raise your activation level closer to your opti-psych level, attention should narrow, reducing task-irrelevant cues and helping you focus on task-relevant ones. Thus, a basketball player with too low an activation level may find that energizing helps her eliminate a lot of distractions such as the crowd, the way her uniform fits, the temperature in the gym and her plans for after the game. Thus, energization can help underaroused athletes improve their concentration through attentional narrowing (see Chapter 12).
Elevates Confidence
Energization skills should enhance athletes’ confidence in their ability to perform more successfully when tired, during the latter stages of competitions, and under difficult circumstances. Although it is clearly no substitute for skills, knowing you can draw on your energy reserves in times of need is a big confidence booster.
Perform Better
Ultimately, the effectiveness of energization depends on its ability to enhance performance. Energization skills should allow athletes to get more out of practices when they are often too underaroused by helping to increase concentration and motivation. Underarousal is less common in competition except late in games as energy reserves are depleted and in times of hardship, adversity and failure. When athletes are confident that they can draw on energy reserves at these times, it should give them a decided performance edge.
Do Relaxation and Energization Work?
For relaxation and energization to benefit your performance, you must be convinced of their effectiveness. In our “more-is-better” society that thrives on a maximal work ethic, does relaxation really play a role in athletic success? Can less really be more? Conversely, does the ability to energize yourself at critical times benefit performance? Let’s see if we can’t increase your belief in value of relaxation and energization as a performance enhancement strategies by reviewing the experiential and scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness.
Scientific Evidence
The scientific evidence supporting energization is nonexistent. Thus, this section will focus on the limited research on relaxation, with the consensus of this research supporting the efficacy of relaxation as a performance enhancement strategy. Scientific evidence supporting relaxation comes from three primary lines of research:
· studies predicting sport success or comparing successful and less successful performers,
· anxiety management studies, and
· studies in which relaxation was used as part of a mental training package to enhance competitive cognitions and performance.
Sport Success Research.
Relaxation is an important predictor of success in several studies that have surveyed athletes about factors contributing to their sport success, but findings from this type of research are far from unanimous. For example, Mike Mahoney and Marshall Avener’s (1977) classic study with participants in the 1976 U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials found that level of relaxation and ability to use anxiety constructively were important discriminators between Olympic Team qualifiers and nonqualifiers. Qualifiers were more relaxed and used their anxiety more constructively than did nonqualifiers who were more tense and interpreted their anxiety in a more detrimental way. Orlick and Partington (1988) also found relaxation facilitated the performance of Canadian Olympic athletes. Additionally, the peak performance and Flow literature has also confirmed the importance of relaxation to performing optimally. Finally, Gould and his colleagues (Gould, Eklund & Jackson, 1993; Gould, Finch & Jackson, 1993) concluded from qualitative interviews with Olympic wrestlers and U.S. National Champion figure skaters that relaxation strategies were importance for competitive success. However, not all field-based sport research supports the performance enhancement value of relaxation. Several studies fail to document that relaxation patterns can distinguish between successful versus less successful competitors, elite versus nonelite performers, or best and worst performances.
Anxiety Management Research
The anxiety research of Martens and his colleagues (Martens, Burton, Vealey, Bump, & Smith, 1990) confirms that both physical and mental anxiety can have a detrimental impact on performance. Several studies have documented that relaxation can facilitate sport performance, usually for tasks such as basketball free throwing shooting that must be performed under anxiety-provoking circumstances or with athletes high in trait anxiety.
Relaxation as Part of Mental Training Packages
Several studies have tested the effectiveness of mental training programs that included relaxation along with several other mental training tools to enhance performance. These studies generally demonstrated positive performance enhancement effects, but none of these studies have attempted to determine how much relaxation contributed to athletes’ overall performance improvement compared to the other mental training tools employed.
Thus, relaxation research in sport has been somewhat limited, but the overall conclusion from available research is that self talk has a positive relationship with performance and relaxation strategies can be helpful for enhancing skill development and competitive performance.
Now that you have seen the evidence for yourself supporting the value of relaxation, let’s take a look at how relaxation and energization work.
How Relaxation and Energization Work
Let’s try to get a better idea about how relaxation and energization work and the types of techniques that you can use to relax or energize in order to develop a better competitive frame-of-mind, increase your enjoyment of competition, and enhance your performance.
Understanding Relaxation and Stress Management
Davidson and Schwartz (1976) have developed a psychophysiological model that helps us better understand relaxation and how relaxation techniques work to help athletes relax effectively. Davidson and Schwartz’ research revealed several important stress management principles, the most interesting finding being that certain relaxation techniques seemed to be more effective in dealing with specific types of anxiety and were more ineffective managing others. They concluded that the equivocal results in the anxiety reduction literature were probably due to the differences in the degree of compatibility between the type of anxiety being experienced and the ability of the treatment to alleviate that form of anxiety. Building on this concept, they subsequently developed a relaxation model that identifies four major categories of anxiety individuals typically experience and specifies the stress management techniques that will be most effective in dealing with each anxiety type.