Coaching Sport Psychology + Strength and Conditioning: Perceived Focus as a Driver for Athlete Buy In and Performance Output

By David Smith, M.Sc., SDL (He/Him)
Both Strength and Conditioning as well as Sport Psychology, as fundamental components of athletic development, are still struggling to find their footing in sport. While any athlete and coach, especially at the elite level will tell you, the “mental” aspect of performance is the key to achieving success. Despite this, many athletes, sport coaches and teams do not fully understand the relevance world of physical and mental conditioning as it relates to overall athletic development.

This can be a particular challenge when working with athletes, especially youth athletes for which are in a period of their athletic journey where developing physical and mental conditioning matters most. While every team has it’s fair distribution of athletes, the ones who are super motivated to train and those who are barely motivated to show up. The majority of which fall somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum. In the end, they are their because they love the game itself, so as long as they’re playing the game, they are happy.  

The challenge comes when the athletes are not “playing the game”. Developing both physical and mental conditioning involves training that, while sport specific, isn’t necessarily playing the game itself. Thus, generating “buy in” for the athletes to maintain focus during training sessions and putting forth a true max effort can be difficult. After all, if they’re not “kicking around a football, how does this make us into better soccer players?”

This is a question for which I am asked quite often when working with my footballers. It’s a super easy question to answer, at least it is on my end. In fact, every time I answer that question, the answer always touches upon different thing. “It’s important to build [insert physical/mental skill here] because during gameplay blah blah blah. Or even trying to make connections to inspiration leaders in the sport “did you see Christiano Reynaldo jump 3m to head that ball? This is how he did it. Sometimes the answer hits the team and suddenly the effort level spikes, other times it doesn’t and followed up with “are we done yet?” Come next week it’s rinse and repeat.

Generating “buy in” with athletes is easier the more you actively work with them in training and competition as our coaching philosophies are imparted onto our athletes and they are able to better understand the bigger picture of it all. Working as both a S&C Coach and Applied Sport Psychology Practitioner, this can be a challenge when the clubs themselves are unwilling to invest (training time, space, equipment, and money) into the level of training that we all would like. But even with the minimal investment and limited sessions, my focus is on making each training session as substantial as possible. Making it so that athletes can take away as much possible toward their overall holistic growth as an athlete and a person.

Whenever I am asked “why is [insert exercise here] relevant?” I will always give a solid (technical, metaphorical, and symbolical) answer. Each exercise in the training has a specific focus, but when it comes to coaching that exercise, the developmental focus isn’t enough to keep the athletes focused and motivate them to put forth their best effort. To get the performance output I want from my athletes toward the developmental focus, I need to guide them with a perceived focus of the exercise. The perceived focus generates the buy in I need as a coach to achieve the training goals for the session while helping the athlete see the bigger picture as it relates to their modus operandi.

For example, I set up a sprint course with two cones 10m apart. The task was to sprint to the cone 10m, turn and sprint back. The developmental focus of this exercise is to train sprint acceleration, de-cceleration, and change of direction, as well as anaerobic capacity. This is useful and necessary within the dynamic context of soccer gameplay. For this particular set the athletes train max speed and effort as measured by Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE), with at least 90-120 seconds of rest in between each sprint.

We ran the exercise for several rounds each across three different sets, but we changed the perceived focus of the exercise.

• Set #1– In four groups, one athlete per group runs the sprint with the next athlete starting upon the first athlete finishing.
  • Perceived Focus: Run the sprint at max effort, focus on acceleration, de-cceleration, change of direction.
• Set #2– In four groups, one athlete per group runs the sprint with the next athlete starting after a high five exchange from the first athlete.
  • Perceived Focus: Run the sprint as a relay race, challenging the athletes to race each other and try to be the group that finishes first.
• Set#3- In four groups, one athlete per group runs the sprint, but each sprint is started independently on signal by the coach.
  • Perceived Focus: Each athlete races the against the other two athletes to be the one to finish first.

While the task and developmental focus itself was inherently the same, changing the perceived focus generated different behaviors from the athletes. Based on basic, non-scientific observations, both the racing sets created more enthusiastic, energetic, and reactionary behaviors from the athletes. The athletes were cheering on the teammates within their group, celebrating the wins and even engaging in some light hearted trash talking. It was clear the athletes were more invested in the exercise itself as it related to their competitive nature and cohesion as a team.

Furthermore, the RPE was higher during the racing sets compared to the individual sets as was the timing of each sprint faster, with the athletes needing a longer rest period in between rounds to recover. The irony of this being that during the non-racing set, the athletes were more likely to complain about fatigue from the set and ask for a longer recovery. Yet during the racing sets there were no complaints regarding fatigue even though it was clear in my observations that the racing sets generated higher fatigue as correlated with the increased RPE and faster sprint times.

Following a water break, for the last exercise at the end of the session, we set up two tic tac toe board on the field. Divided the athletes into four groups, with two teams per board and each team with three cones. Playing a game of Tic Tac Toe, with one athlete per team in play at a time, starting 10m back and run to the board, place the cone, then run back to high five the next one to go. Once all the cones were on the board, the athletes would continue but only allowed to move one cone per turn and would keep playing the game until Tic Tac Toe was achieved.

While the task itself (10m sprint with focus on acceleration/deceleration/change of direction) was inherently the same, adding in the cognitive challenge of playing the game which includes observing the status of the board, strategically placing the cone to (1) achieve tic tac toe and (2) block the other team from achieving tic tac toe adds a further competitive pressure to challenge mental and physical capabilities of the athletes. Within the game, it’s difficult to measure the timing of each sprint itself, the competitive nature of the game itself highlights that the RPE and performance output is similar to that of the relay race sets.

The key about the Tic Tac Toe game is playing it at the end of the session, where the athletes would report the highest levels of fatigue following the rest of the exercise training sets. While the developmental focus of the tic tac toe game is as described above, the perceived focus for the athletes themselves was purely on playing the game itself within the instructed parameters. The parameters being…

• One athlete in play at a time.
• All athletes must be 10m back.
• Each athlete can only place or move their own team’s cone once per turn.

There were no further instructions regarding task focus, technique, or anything else as all the relevant coaching cues in that regard would’ve been established earlier in the session. For the athletes, Tic Tac Toe was all about playing the game. By the end of the game, the athletes are reporting their highest levels of RPE, with a few dramatically laid out on the pitch to catch their breath. Yet upon my final “how ya feeling?” check in with them, the athletes are all smiles and reporting they had fun, and it was a good session. Furthermore, by the next week they’re asking to play more Tic Tac Toe.

While I only have a short 45–60-minute session once per week with team, in that short amount of time my developmental focus goals of building sprinting speed, agility skills, and anaerobic capacity in the athletes were achieved. Furthermore, the exercises helped to build group cohesion, communication, and task/session enjoyment. Plus, the Tic Tac Toe game further challenged executive functions, working memory, strategy, and judgement/decision making behaviors.

As the season progressed, the “buy in” and general intrinsic motivation from the athletes increased, with more consistent attendance and active participation and increased effort output from the athletes, even during the “not so much fun” aspects of the training. There was also a shift from “why do we have to do this?” type questioning toward more innate curiosity toward the technicalities of the exercises, with athletes asking what the developmental focus of the exercise was. All of this through simply changing the perceived focus of the exercise, making it fun for the athletes by tapping into their innate competitive drive and bridging the perceived gap between the physical/mental conditioning and sport specific gameplay.