Retired NFL Players at a Great Risk

American Football is a very tough sport to be successful in. NFL players put their heart and soul into every throw, run, catch, and tackle in order to keep their jobs and make a name for themselves, putting themselves at risk to many physical and mental injuries. Deaths occur in football once in a while, paralysis is frequent, and concussions seem to be diagnosed every other game. Even after retiring, many players will find themselves in a constant struggle due to the nature of tackles and number of concussions they've had over their career from youth football on. Players can retire seemly fully healthy and develop problems later on.

For example, a recent study found that the percentage of dementia, a condition that leaves people almost unable to function, for people above the age of 50 is about 1%. For former NFL players, it was 6.1%. Even scarier is the numbers for people between 30 and 49. Only .1% of people in that age group have dementia, a tiny amount. For NFL players, it was 1.9% (19 times greater than the average).

Another study at the University of Michigan did a more general study on the mental health of retired players. It found that retired players were generally more depressed than other people their age, especially for people between 30 and 49. It also found that retired players seemed to have more control of their anger, however the researchers concluded that a majority of the players may have felt unwilling to acknowledge their acts of violence.

People don't seem to understand that it doesn't just take one huge hit to ruin a player's life; a consistent amount of what would be considered normal collisions and tackles can be just as dangerous. That is why these problems seem to be the most common in linemen, who literally run into each other every play. So if you question the amount of money that NFL players should be paid, think about what they will likely have to deal with in their future. Many of them will need it because they won't be able to support themselves and their families otherwise.

Prepare and Perform

Dr. Lisa Cohn and Dr. Patrick Cohn discuss in their article, Help Your Young Athletes Improve Confidence with Pre-Game Rituals, an aspect of sport psychology that teaches the importance of a pre-game ritual.  What goes an hour or so before a game is crucial.  Something that could really hurt an athlete’s performance before a game or competition is: A parent sizing up the other team/ competitors in front of their kid.  This is not going to motivate them, it is just going to make them even more anxious than they are already feeling.  They need to be away from the competition, and only focusing on themselves and how they are going to perform.

Finding a pre-game ritual that works for a specific athlete is very important.  Here are a couple suggestions:

1)      Listen to music: make a playlist of your favorite music.  Typically high energy music is best, but try anything that would help you focus.  The main goal is to get yourself isolated from your family and friends, and embody your role as an athlete.  You cannot have any outside distractions.

2)      Picture positive: envision yourself scoring that goal and making that basket.  Filling yourself up with positive feelings will boost your confidence which will in effect your performance.  This can relate to both self-fulfilling prophecy and self-efficacy.  With self-fulfilling prophecy, your beliefs affect your behavior.  If you believe that you will be successful, it is more likely that you will end up fulfilling your original beliefs because you will act and perform like a winner.  Self-efficacy is confidence in being able to perform a task at a certain level.  If you have this you will be further motivated which will increase your performance and perseverance.

3)      Visualize: this relates to the above suggestion, but even more than just thinking positive, visualize yourself making that difficult jump shot or going through your routine.  This is in itself a rehearsal because it programs the athletes mind and body, and helps keep athletes focused.

As a former competitive figure skater, I had my own pre-competition ritual.  An hour before I was scheduled to skate I would separate myself from everybody.  I would find a quiet place or some place where I did not know anybody around me, blast my music very loud with my favorite band, and start warming up and stretching.  While I was to my stretching stage I typically switched the music over my skating routine's music.  I would visualize myself out on the ice doing my routine over and over again.  Each time I would see myself landing every jump and executing every spin perfectly.  After I finished this I would talk only to my coach until I went on the ice who would give me brief motivating lines from time to time while helping me further stretch.  People would come up to me and wish me luck, but that is not what I needed.  I needed to be one with myself, and be completely in tune with my body.  Any distraction could potentially make me lose all of my focus.  Something that I always tried to do, but was always difficult not to do, was to not look at other skaters.  Either on the warm up ice, or during their routines.   Seeing a competitor mess up may boost your confidence, but seeing a fellow competitor skating a perfect program could be very distracting and stressful.  It is just important for athletes to remember to stay focused on themselves and their performance.  Nothing else and no one else matters until you finish that game or performance.

Unique Ways to Get Exercise in College

It is a proven fact that exercise has a positive influence on mental health, but while in college it may be hard to get the exercise that one needs to not go crazy from all the work. You might not want to go to the gym, large projects may keep you inside for long periods of time, or perhaps you have no interest in any of the sports offered on campus. Regardless of the reason, many students either don't feel they have the time to exercise or do not enjoy the most widely used forms of exercise.

If you are one of these students, there are options and they probably are not what you would have expected.

1. LARP

This first one probably will only appeal to the very nerdy, but regardless it is a different way of getting out of your dorm. Live action role play, or LARP, is an activity where people take on a persona of someone in a fantasy world to the point where they give themselves a name, race, back story, and beliefs. They then interact with other participants and let creativity take the reigns. LARP's exercise comes from the quests or the created story that have the people involved traveling fairly long distances, doing tasks that could be physical, or even fighting each other with foam weapons (LARP's most famous aspect). Every player creates their own swords, daggers, axes, bows, ect. out of foam or other soft materials, with some safety restrictions, and frequently engage in duels or large fights with other players. These can get quite hectic and can be a lot of fun. If this sparks your interest, you can up about it more here and see if your campus has a LARP club or something along the same lines, maybe even start one up yourself!

2. Humans vs. Zombies



Started in Goucher College in Baltimore nearly 6 years ago, Humans vs. Zombies, or HvZ, has spread like wildfire across college campuses in the US and to other countries as far away as Australia. The game plays like a large game of tag. Everyone starts off as a human except for one or more players designated as original zombies, OZ's for short. Their objective is to find the other players and attempt to tag them. If they can successfully do so, that player becomes a zombie as well and must go after other humans. Humans can defend themselves, however, by using foam dart guns, such as Nerf guns, or balled up socks. If they can shoot a zombie or hit them with a sock, the zombie becomes "stunned" and cannot tag humans for an allotted amount of time. Humans are normally marked with a bandanna wrapped around their arm while zombies wear the bandanna wrapped around their head, making it clear who is who. The game is played 24/7 for a specified amount of days or weeks, meaning if you're a human who needs to get to class that you should either move quickly, go a longer yet less traveled route, or move with another human. The rest of the game is variable depending on the campus. Many schools only allow tags outside of buildings, some let humans defend themselves with marshmallows as well, and some schools organize missions where the humans have to complete a task that, if completed, will make rule alterations in their favor. The missions are normally the most fun part of the game for both humans and zombies and can have players running all over campus. The game is a blast and is not only a great way to get exercise, but also to meet new friends. If interested, you can get more information here. See if your school will be running any games in the future or talk to the school to see if you can get permission to start a game of your own.

3. Simply Walk More

Say your schedule really is so crammed that you don't have time for a club or activity. If this is the case, you would be surprised how much better you could feel if you decided to not drive to a class one day if you live on campus, or maybe skip the cross-campus bus for a change and instead leave your dorm early and walk the whole way. If you already have to walk the whole way, take a detour that will have you walking longer. Sustained walking for at least 30 minutes a day gives significant health benefits and the more you get, the better. For a list of all the benefits, click here.

Goal Setting Controversy

Although many researchers in industrial psychology believe it is well established that goal setting regularly and reliably improves performance, many still need to be won over concerning the positive results in sports. There have been explanations that cause controversy but Blaine Kyllo and Daniel Landers of the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology have found that all too often scientists are ignoring the significance of statistics. "A meta-analytic review of the literature investigating the effects of goal setting on performance in sport and exercise could clarify the state of knowledge. Overall, setting goals improves performance in sport by 0.34 of a standard deviation. Moderate, absolute, and combined short- and long-term goals were associated with the greatest effects. Additional moderator variables were identified, and how they alter the relationship is discussed."

In Daniel Smith and Michael Bar-Eli’s book, Essential Readings in Sport and Exercise Psychology, they encouraged research that would provide more generality to the findings regarding the effects of goal difficulty on athletic performance. (Instead of the male-only subjects of middle to high socio-economic status that Kyllo and Landers pursued.) Then there could be more empirical data that confirms that setting unrealistically high goals is detrimental to motivation and performance. This has been an idea that has always been supported by previous sport psychology literature, but never backed up with sufficient empirical data.

Personally, I have found that goal setting in sports (and life) helps a great deal. I specifically remember laying on my Varsity Soccer Coach's living room floor with my teammates before we got on the bus to go to our Sectional Finals and having her talk us through a visual of us playing well and winning the game. It made it seem that much more possible when it was approached in that realistic way. We all felt connected in our determination and were on the same page with our group goals in mind. If you can visualize it and set the goal of playing to the best of your ability, you can do it.

We were Co-Champions.

A New Way to Deal With Injuries or the Placebo Effect?

My mom has always been a big supporter of natural medicines and things of that nature so it was no surprise that when she found out about the new Amega Zero-Point Energy Wand that she would jump right on it, now being a spokesperson for the company. Let me explain exactly what this is. The idea is Indian scientists have found a way to crystallize a form of energy called zero-point energy. Think of it as the stem cells of energy; it becomes whatever it is needed to be. From the crystal, zero-point energy radiates and goes into everything around it supposedly for hundreds of years without stopping. They took this crystal (which no one has seen) and put it into the tip of what looks like a fully metallic pen, which is the wand I mentioned earlier. People can then use the wand by twirling it on hurt or stressed parts of the body and the energy will help your body out and make the areas feel significantly better. A link to see Amega's claims can be found here.
You may be wondering what exactly this has to do with sports. Well the first thing I must say is that it does get results and because of this, it has many users. Some of these users are coaches. If an athlete gets hurt, whether they pull a muscle or break a bone, the coaches have the athlete "wanded" to help them recover. The crazy thing is that it does help, but is it the reason that the users believe it is?

The idea itself is very laughable. You wave a pen that has some mysterious crystal in it that no one has ever seen and it can heal most problems. To many it might be confusing as to why this odd product seems to be gaining a small following (it still is far from mainstream). Well the company, Amega, states that they have done extensive testing and all of their experiments have confirmed everything they advertise it does. There are a few problems here. First off, they do not give out many details about the experiments they ran. Second, because the experiments are being done within the company there is likely the problem of experimenter expectancy. Their researchers may be seeing results that aren't necessarily there. Thirdly, their experiments are the only ones that have been performed on the wand. Without unbiased researchers weighing in and running their own experiments, there is very little credibility in anything the company claims.

Without any facts or real experimentation, the only thing that can be concluded right now is that the wand is a physical form of the placebo effect. The likely reason as to why people feel better after being "wanded" is that they believe that it will. It has been proven that people somehow heal from this state of believing so it is understandable that if the wand is really just a scam, people still can get benefit from it.

Who knows, it might actually work and the company is just very secretive about it. While it may not seem likely, people still get something out of it. To each his own. If it works for them, why not let them use it?

Imagine? Dream? Relax?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reamOikoLaREvck
http://www.dreamviews.com/section/what-lucid-ding-7/

Yeung Shing Cheng

According to Dr.Elligan, a clinical psychologist from Chicago, Illinois, Sport Psychology can be used to boost athletic performance in any sport. He describes that skills alone will not be able to make someone a good athlete. One needs some sort of psychological support in order to perform at full potential.

Visualizations, according to Dr. Elligan, could very much help on succeeding in a race. Dr. Elligan said that he would usually see runners the day before a marathon at the finish line, having the runners visualize themselves completing the race. Through this process they prepare themselves for the marathon and are less likely to give up midway. The runners push themselves to the fullest with a vision of crossing the finish line, giving them the strength to continue running.

Another skill that Dr.Elligan describes is called a Lucid Dream. A handful of elite athletics use Lucid Dream to mentally prepare themselves for a tournament or any kind of competition. It is almost like a higher level of visualization but in a dream. Within their Lucid Dream, athletes are in control of their environment, making it possible for these athletes to be mentally prepared in their dream. So if you are looking to become an elite athlete, I suggest that you start learning how to control your dreams.

Sport Psychology also helps athletes relax. When time is ticking and you are on the verge of exploding all you care about is winning; that’s when relaxation comes in. According to Dr. Elligan, it’s better when athletes are relaxed so that they could enjoy the journey instead of just focusing on reaching the finish line.

What is Self-Confidence in Sports?

In this video sport psychology expert Dr. Patrick Cohn talks about self confidence and how it can be gained and lost.  There are two types of self confidence: global level and task specific.  Global level is the belief in your abilities and belief in that you and your team can win.  It has to do with how you perceive your own ability or you perception on your ability to win.  Task specific is like a figure skater's belief that they can successfully compete a specific jump and that they have the ability to land that jump.  You can have confidence in your double axel, but not as much in your triple lutz and that makes your confidence task specific.  

Confidence comes from many factors but some of the things that people do not associate confidence with as often are: the conditions you play in, the quality of your warm up, your parents, and your teammates.  A very important thing for athletes to learn and remember is that you need to be in control your confidence since you cannot be in control of what other people say and do.  What you can control is how you think, and how you practice and perform.  

Confidence can be destroyed by several factors: not performing well, having a poor practice, by other people, and by high/ elevated expectations.   If you do not reach your goal your confidence will decrease so it is very important to set yourself goals that you will be able to accomplish.  Otherwise it will mirror poorly on your performance and confidence.  


This is very much related to self-efficacy.  If you have the confidence to perform in your sport or a specific task at a certain level, your performance will increase which will in return boost your self confidence even more.  Again, that level you set for yourself should be realistic, and should not stress perfection or something that is beyond your capabilities. 

Dr. Cohn says that it is important to understand that confidence is long term, stable, and comes from many years of practice.  You cannot only be confident when you have a good practice session and then have no confidence when you have a bad day.  That is not true confidence in yourself and that will affect your sport performance.

You can watch this video on YouTube here.