This article was in last week's Listener (New Zealand current affairs magazine). It's about the All Blacks cracking under pressure, but I found the second half of it quite interesting in relation to freediving.
I'm hoping that if you click on these images they will become bigger so you can read them. Otherwise you can try this link.
I think that as freedivers we should know our dives so well that in competition we can just switch off, do our best and enjoy the experience. I've always had a song for statics and I call on it if I'm struggling to just tune out.
Practicing under stress and positive thinking are also beneficial to freedivers.
2 comments:
unfortunately pictures are unreadable, but let's hope, that article will be available by the end of the month
Its worth noting that the article is citing Beilock, who's model of the cognitive basis of 'choking' is actually controversial, and was critiqued at a workshop I was at just recently.
For athlete purposes however, the conclusion -broadly- still hold, particularly the stuff about practising under pressure.
However the main points of the controversy are that in actual fact, we might need to maintain concentration on strategic and high level tasks even if introspecting the low level body control tasks are counter-productive. This is particularly true for sports like rugby, where high level strategic goals (kick or pass) have to be kept 'in mind' even as lower level sensiromotor tasks aren't.
So Wayne Christensen has pointed out that aviation psychology recognises distinctions between system awareness (what the plane is doing) to task awareness (what am I doing now) and strategic awareness (where am I flying to?). The pilot has to switch between these levels of awareness at different times.
In sporting performances there might be similarly multiple levels of focus and attention, and its not just a matter of 'switching off' as Beilock argues, but rather moving to the appropriate level of awareness at the right time.
But as I say, the broad conclusion, that practising under pressure and concentrating on positives, holds across all the cognitive models from what I can see.
Clearly the complicating factor for freedivers is the psychological processing under extreme physiological conditions, particularly oxygen deprivation near the end of dives. Thus far, I haven't found much in the sports science/psychology literature dealing with this, although there is a little in the dive science/aeronautical medicine literature. I will let you know if I find a good overview or review of this stuff.
If you want to complicate your life, the original Beilock and Carr article can be found in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Volume 130, Issue 4, December 2001, Pages 701-725, and is titled: On the Fragility of Skilled Performance: What Governs Choking Under Pressure?
Its by Sian L. Beilock, , a and Thomas H. Carr
Post a Comment