Paige Schember: August 2014

(Most of) the fam out on a hike sporting BeFAST (duh)

Holy moley, who would have thought summer flies by so quickly? Between training and work and moving into a new apartment, I've hardly had time to sit down and think, let alone write a blog post! So my apologies. Let's see, what's been going on? Earlier this August I was lucky enough to have my whole family + Sam come out and visit. We did some hikes, had dinner at the Unser's (my host fam's) house, spent a day up at Redfish, and had quality fam time. It was awesome to see them and be able to show them around Ketchum.

Training has been going well, last weekend a few of us bagged Decker Peak and were treated to some pretty gorgeous views of the Sawtooths. Major credit for me making it through the 6.5 hours goes to the Stanley Bakery for the delicious and very large pre-hike breakfast, as well as Matt for bringing a water purifier wand-thingy (I learned the hard way that a camelbak is basically a must-have when you live out West).

So. Now for my super nerdy psychology rant/sidetrack. Last spring I took a class on Sports Psychology, and for my final paper I decided to research the relationship between emotions and performance. For your sake I'll try to make this short, but BASICALLY what I found was that positive emotions broaden our attention and decrease our awareness of the possibility and consequences of failure. This facilitates automatic processing in our brains, by reducing the strain on our working memory to complete sport behaviors (i.e. technique and skill execution). Automatic processing is basically when rules and motions of a sport's actions become so mentally and physically ingrained that an athlete doesn't have to concentrate on doing them. The ease of sport behavior then aides performance.

My brother Brendan and I at Redfish!

Negative emotions (anger, sadness, frustration, fear), on the other hand, narrow and shift the athlete's attention toward "irrelevant threats" such as thoughts, feelings, or personal concerns. This change requires working memory capacity, which turns the athlete toward control processing, when each sport action has to be consciously thought-through in a step-by-step format.

Following so far? Okay. Great.

Many of you have probably heard of the term flow. (Not, not hair flow). Flow is a mental and physical state associated with full enjoyment of an activity, because the challenges that the activity presents are completely balanced with an athlete's skills. It's the perfect example of an athlete's positive emotions affecting their performance. The happiness/relaxation/excited-ness felt before training or a competition reduces working memory load and therefore causes automatic processing to happen more easily. The athlete feels completely absorbed and in what they're doing, and they enjoy it, because the skill comes easier to them.

It's important to also remember that while positive emotions aid performance in general, the perfect emotions for one athlete may not work for another. The balance between emotions and performance can be measured on sort of a spectrum, called the Individualized Zone of Optimal Functioning (IZOF) model. Emotion form, content, context, intensity, and time can factor into an athlete's optimal states, but the ideal bottom-line balance of emotions to strive for are actually termed championship emotions: enthusiasm, zeal, and confidence.

Which I guess is the object of this nice little rant: your emotions can play a large part in both how you train and perform. Not just in affecting your attitude, but in actually affecting how you physically carry out the actions needed for whatever sport you are a part of; whether V1 skating in skiing, shooting a basketball, or performing a gymnastics routine. And if you figure out which emotions work for you, you can practice channeling and maintaining them around competition time.

Okay. All done. How COOL is that? It blows my mind how our brains can affect our performance so easily. And THAT is why sports psychology is one of my absolute favorite things ever. And also why being happy and relaxed while on the road and at home has become one of my biggest priorities.

So, stay happy everyone. :)

Here's the full paper if you're interested.

Oh! The next two weeks we are training at the USST camp in Lake Placid, NY! So that's what I'm up to now. I'm super pumped to be around some amazing athletes, not only to be challenged but also learn from them. I'll let you know how it goes!