You know, they say that pressure creates diamonds, but the truth is that for most athletes it creates chaos. And here’s why. Whenever we look at high performing athletes and we contrast them to athletes who kind of struggle or don’t deal with pressure very well. We have to understand that physical skills are not the problem.
Most athletes, especially those that have reached a higher level of performance, their physical skills are pretty good. The question is about application under pressure, and we are learning a ton more now from a brain-based perspective about why pressure breaks some athletes and what to do about it in a training environment.
We have to understand, again, physical skills don’t solve the problem. We have to make sure that the brain is able to understand what it’s seeing, filter it appropriately, and then make great decisions under the stress of a game, or you know, in my case I work with first responders. So under this, you know, life and death stress.
So what does the brain tell us about that? Or what does brain science tell us about what’s going on? Well, it’s pretty simple and it’s gonna involve a word called inhibition. Now, if this is of interest to you as a movement professional, first and foremost, contact us. We’re gonna get into a little bit more detailed discussion here, but you can DM us on Instagram. You can call us. You can email us. We’ve got some links for you in the description and the pinned post, ’cause we wanna talk to you because if you deal with people who must make life and death decisions, or whose livelihood is dependent upon performing well under pressure, then you have to understand inhibition. You have to understand how the brain works because you can change the way that they’re training to improve them.
So inhibition is a really simple idea. It is basically that our frontal lobe, the more human part of our brain, where the, where we say executive function lives. Executive function is what allows us to look at things and make long-term plans and all this cool stuff as human beings That lives primarily in the frontal lobe of the brain.
Now, the way that that functions is to inhibit, craziness. That’s the easiest way for me to say it. The more primal aspects of humans have to be inhibited. So as a really, really basic example, I’m gonna talk about the eyes, because if we’re in a natural environment and we’re sitting there, we’re sitting in the park and we’re relaxing and our peripheral vision picks up a movement, let’s say to the right, our reflexive response to that is to take our eyes from whatever we’re doing and jump them over to what has just moved, evaluate it, and then come back to what we were doing, unless this thing over here is dangerous That happens hundreds of times. Per second in some cases. So we have this thing called reflexive saccades. Now, what’s challenging about that in a performance environment is that reflexive saccades can get you killed in a, as a first responder, or they can get you beaten as an athlete.
One of the things that we have to be able to do as high level performers is we have to be able to inhibit what our brain reflexively wants to do, and this can go into a lot of different worlds, like, Hey, I maybe you have a relationship in your natural response to a certain tone of voice is to lose your temper.
That’s kind of your reflexive response. You wanna maintain that relationship. What do you have to do? You have to inhibit that reflexive response. And that’s all kind of frontal lobe driven. So whenever we start looking at performance under pressure, one of the first things that we test with athletes is their ability to inhibit reflexive responses, particularly while in motion. Alright, so the way that we do this, we literally use the eyes as our first test. We do what’s called an anti-saccade test. And anti-saccade works like this. I have the athlete stand, I have them look at my nose and I put my fingers up like this, and then I give them these instructions.
If I move a finger, you need to not look at that finger. You need to saccade move your eyes quickly as you can to the opposite target. So again, if I’m looking at the camera and I see this finger move reflexively, I would wanna look at it. That’s a normal reflexive saccade But what I want you to do is see that motion and then go the opposite direction.
That’s, it’s that simple. I know that sounds dumb, but this is a training drill and what will shock you is if you have clients, you have athletes, you have first responders that have struggled in pressure situations. You test their anti-saccades particularly when they’re a little bit tired and all of a sudden you’ll see them making mistakes and the mistakes will look like they move up. And they’ll do things like that where they look and they’re like, oh shoot. And then they fix it over and over.
So whenever we we’re working with athletes, like I said, people that are have to do high stress, we’ll start off, we’ll do these anti-saccade test and I will do it for two to three minutes, which is exhausting.
It’s so much focus. And what you will often see is about 60 seconds in or 90 seconds in, all of a sudden they’re. Their error rate goes up and up. I may also have them do it after maybe an interval session or maybe if it’s an a, a field up field sport athlete, we’ll do a little bit of wind sprinting or whatever, bring ’em back, make sure they’re fatigued, and then we test them.
So it is not sometimes gonna show up in an athlete who isn’t fatigued. So when you’re thinking about the people that you work with, you have to ask them stuff like, do you struggle at the end of games? At the end of a tournament, do you struggle, you know, in some kind of high stress situation? Is it the moment you get there or is it after you’ve been there for a while?
Because that can then again, tell you how much stress do I need to put on them when I’m doing anti-saccade testing. Now, anti-saccades don’t have to just be the eyes. It can involve movement. So you can come up with a ton of different ways. We have a huge amount of this information in throughout our core curriculum, also in our brain-based practitioners guided cognition.
Like there’s so many ways to use inhibitory training to make people better. It would blow your mind. But what I’m trying to get across to you is that if you want to create, if you want pressure really to create diamonds. You’ve gotta make sure that the brain is working correctly, otherwise, pressure is just gonna create chaos.
So if you’re a brain-based professional, a movement professional, interested in bringing brain-based training into what you do, uh, please again, DM us on Instagram. Give us a call, send us an email because we’d love to talk to you.
