Sport Psychology Tactics - How Athletes Can Train Aggression For Peak Mental Performance
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: How Sport Psychologists Help Athletes Train Aggression
Humans are complicated creatures with complex emotions. But our emotions and how they affect our behaviors may be one of the most defining aspects of our species. For good or for bad, we rely heavily on our emotions to make many of the decisions that guide us in our lives. All of our emotions have significant purpose in our lives, but aggression may be one of the most intriguing ones. We have an incredibly uncomfortable ‘relationship’ with this emotion as we recognize that aggression can be ‘beneath’ our species. People often say ‘we’re better than that’.
The uncomfortable truth though is that we are not ‘better than that’ and aggression is a critical component of the human experience. Furthermore, athletes have encounters with aggression all of the time. I believe that most sport psychologists unnecessarily work with athletes to suppress aggression which is detrimental to their overall development. Because I believe this is such an important issue I want to use this issue of the Training Report to further explore aggression. In Part I. we will begin by defining aggression. In part II. we will some of the brain science behind aggression, and in Part III. we will review how athletes can mentally train aggression.
Part I. Defining Aggression In Sports Performance
Almost every athlete has probably heard coaches or sport psychologists say ‘be more aggressive’ but these same individuals never instruct athletes how to do this. The first place we need to start is by defining what aggression is and how to be more aggressive. Aggression has been defined as ‘a behavior aimed at opposing or attacking something or someone’. I believe one of the key words in this definition is attack. Attacking usually indicates that you are acting off of instinct, and that there is very little time in between the moment you choose to do something and then actually act on that thought. Coaches and athletes most likely gravitate towards liking this emotion because on a very deep level, we recognize that the aggressive athlete is not ‘overthinking’ and overthinking is the last thing athletes and coaches want to be doing.
But there is something even more fundamental about understanding human aggression. Many humans like to think that we are somehow more ‘evolved’ than our animal kingdom counterparts, but the truth is that we are just a different species within this family tree. In the book Affective Neuroscience, The Foundations Of Human & Animal Emotions by Jaak Panksepp, the author beautifully illustrates this point in the following excerpt: Without the neocortical sophistication that we humans possess, other animals simply are not able to have the complex thoughts and feelings about such matters that humans have. Still, elemental emotions like fear and anger occur on every battlefield, and the subcortical nature of these brain states can be understood through animal brain research. With subcortical being the keyword in this statement, let’s explore more about our brain’s role in aggression.
Part II. Athletes, Aggression & Controlled Primal Violence
When I used to coach Olympic weightlifters, one the things I would teach lifters is how to tap into controlled violence. I have talked about this in previous Training Reports, but I want to spend some time reviewing more of the neuroscience behind aggression and this controlled violence. Again, in Jaak Panksepp’s book, he reviews some of the neural circuitry that is behind these behaviors. The author states the following: It seems highly probable that the emotion we commonly call anger or rage derives much of its motivating energy and affective impact from the neural circuits that orchestrate affective attack. The most compelling evidence, of course, comes from subjective reports that have been obtained from humans. The core of RAGE system runs from medial amygdaloid areas downward, largely via the stria terminalis to the medial hypothalamus, and from there to specific locations within the PAG (The periaqueductal gray ‘PAG’, also known as the central gray, is a critical brain region for regulating automatic functions, motivated behaviors, and responses to threats. Additionally, it acts as the primary control center for descending pain modulation) of the midbrain.
The author continues: The system is organized hierarchically, meaning that aggression evoked from the highest areas in the amygdala is critically dependent on the lower regions, while aggression from the lower sites does not depend critically on the integrity of the higher areas. In other words, lesions of both medial hypothalamic and PAG zones, dramatically diminish rage evoked from the amygdala, but not vice versa. Thus, from the diencephalic zones, around the medial hypothalamus, the aggressive tendency is critically dependent on the integrity of the PAG but not of the medial amygdala. This probably indicates that the higher areas provide subtle refinements to the orchestration that is elaborated in the PAG of the mesencephalon. Since the primary evolved function of anger is to motivate individuals to compete effectively for environmental resources, we would anticipate that reciprocal relations would exist between the SEEKING and RAGE systems. What this excerpt highlights for me, is that there is indeed a built in system to access aggression and it is deeply interwoven with many of our other primal responses. Now, let’s focus on HOW athletes can access this.
Part III. How Athletes Can Emotionally Access & Process Aggression And Controlled Primal Violence
One strategy that athletes could use to tap into ‘primal’ controlled violence of aggression is using what is referred to as a weightlifting preload method. In strength & conditioning, Preloading involves actively engaging the muscles before lifting the weight. When coaching new Olympic weightlifting athletes, I teach the preload method to help the athletes synchronize their mind and body before execution of the lift. The reason this method can be effective for athletes to tap into a ‘primal controlled violence’ mental state is because in order to be more ‘aggressive’ athletes need to send the correct signals to their body to generate the proper amount of muscle tension. This can also be accomplished through short shallow breaths, tensing muscles where appropriate, creating strong hand grip sensations and finding ways to create intense experiences of tactile sensory. A type of preload method can be used almost universally in all sports.
Secondly, and just as importantly, athletes need to engage with sport psychologists or licensed psychotherapists to process the experience of creating these mental aggression states. In my opinion, training for performance in sports does not equate to positive health outcomes. But health and performance are interwoven together and as such, athletes need to make sure they process the potential trauma that can come from these types of sports experiences. If athletes can find a way to incorporate mental health and/or sport psychology training into their preparation process, they will be in the best position to optimize their long-term health outcomes while also safely but thoroughly being able to tap into their primal controlled violence. Tapping into this type of aggression does not need to be a negative experience and if anything can be positive and help athletes further explore the depths of their own psychology!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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