Sport Psych

As you probably know already, gymnastics is not like most sports. Most sports are entirely physical, with almost no mental training involved. However, this is another place where gymnastics differs from other sports. There is as much mental training involved as there is physical training, and it is just as important!

My coach decided that we should start doing some sport psychology earlier this year, when almost everyone on my team was having problems with their attitudes. The head coach of Gymnastics Training Center of Utah (GTC) is going to college for sport psychology. Annie DiLuzio and her friend, Kristina Struthwolf, have been coming up every Wednesday for about four months to help us get in shape mentally. 

We started working on “big idea” things, such as breathing, relaxation, and concentration. We came up with cute words to help remind each other of things we have been working on while the coaches have no idea what we are talking about. 

More recently, we have been working a lot on imagery, and transferring it from our classes to the gym. This has also been working really well, and now we are starting to work on things that will help us at meets and good ways to prepare mentally for meets. 

We put all the handouts and worksheets that we get into a book. This is mine!

Sport psych has helped a lot with my gymnastics. However, it is really nice because everything we have learned easily transfers from the gym to school to everything else in life. A lot of the mental calming exercises that we do to help us keep our cool at meets work really well when you are worried for a big test. Even the simpler things work great - breathing, body language, and being in the present.

The thing that has helped me the most is wearing a rubber band on my wrist at all times. Whenever I think something negative, I take the rubber band off, restate the sentence to make it positive, and put the rubber band on the other wrist. I have used this at gym, but even more at school. It is amazing how many negative things you say and don’t realize until you really concentrate on it.

Sport psych has helped me a lot with my gymnastics and a lot with school. The classes are really fun, and the information that we learn is very useful. It is information that you can use to handle any situation, and I am excited to continue using sport psych to help better both my gymnastics and school careers!