Which sports need the most amount of mental toughness?

Two questions we get from time to time are “how mentally demanding is my sport” and “which sports need the most amount of mental toughness”? First, as scientists we try and answer these types of question using evidence rather than guesswork. However, the literature has yet to try and answer this question. So in turn we do the next best thing...make a hypothesis as experts.


There are two ways of looking at this and I’d be interested to hear you opinion on which sounds the most sensible. Theory One is that all sports and performance areas have variables and these variables change the amount of mental toughness required. For example, how long a match lasts for is a variable with the 100 meter sprint at one end and test cricket at the other. Then if you know which side is mentally harder you can start doing some maths. So in the previous example the sports that take longer are mentally harder as they require greater concentration and there’s more time to think. If this is correct then on the variable of duration test cricket would be mentally more draining that a 100 meter athletics race. Other variables would be number of teammates, risk of injury, potential earnings, task complexity, environmental factors, how winners are picked (judged by people or measured by machines), speed of tasks etc.

Before you sit down and try and work out how your pursuit rates on all of the above compared to other sports you might like to consider Theory Two. What if all these variables cancel one another out so that in the end all sports and performance endeavours are equal in terms of mental requirements to reach the top? For example, maybe there is much more pressure on the 100 meter sprint that the test cricketer because he / she will not have time to correct any errors made. An error made by a test cricketer on day one can virtually be forgotten by the time the match is over.

As sport psychologists it suits us to operate as if this second theory is correct as it allows us to treat all of our clients equally and not compare a formula one driver with an ultimate Frisbee player. Both just want to get better, don’t they?

Cheers, GJM

There are no magic days and dates

Non magic days and dates are all the times when we use a specific day or date or holiday or time of year to sabotage our efforts. The most common are “weekends” when people say things such as “I work all week, I’m not going to do anything on my days off…it’s just more work”. Birthdays, public holidays are all dangerous but we’re heading into the most dangerous of the all…the Christmas break. We call them non magic days because of the irrational belief that many people have that these days are ‘special or magic’ in that the normal facts and rules don’t apply. Well they do. Christmas day is a 24 block of time in which going for a jog or a swim will have the exact same effect as if it were any other day of the year. With that in mind, the Condor Performance team hopes that you have much more than just a happy Dec 25th. Cheers, GJM

Practice makes permanent, not perfect

Practice makes perfect is a myth as perfect is unobtainable. Much more accurate is practice makes permanent in that the motor skills you’re practising become so ingrained and natural that nothing can get in their way. One of the biggest dilemmas we face in sport is that to get something to become truly permanent you have to practice it A LOT (estimations suggest around 20 hours a week) and yet doing the same thing over and over will soon become boring. The solution is not to compromise on the amount you practice but vary the types and intensity of the training blocks. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to introduce some mental rehearsal into each practice session where you are either watching clips of how to do it correctly or imagining the same.


Another excellent way of preventing boredom is make sure every training session is challenging. If you don’t already know how to do this then I suggest asking how to add Pressure and Harder Practice to your current regime. It’s gold. GJM

I bet you over-practice what you’re bad at

So you played / participated in an event on the weekend and it didn’t go well. Come Monday you decide you’re going to practice all the things you did poorly and ignore what you did well.


Sound familiar? Well it is and it’s a very bad idea for two main reasons. First, by practising what you’re not doing well you’re actually reminding yourself over and over again that you suck. Imagine if after school you got a select group of kids and made them only do extra maths practice. They would think it must be because their maths skills are poor.

Secondly, by practising what you did poorly on the weekend you are risking swapping your strengths for your weaknesses. One of our aims as sport psychologists is to remove strengths and weaknesses from the picture. How do we do this? You spend your time getting better at the elements of your sport / performance area as they relate to their importance. For example, only about 5% of tennis shots are lob shots so regardless of how good or bad you are at playing the lob you’ll want to spend 5% of your practice time on this shot.

Exact ratios for each sport are rare (golf expected) so please feel free to email us your thoughts for your sport or add a comment below. Cheers, GJM

Why are we still guessing?

Over the weekend we did somewhat of a spring clean...actually it was more like a spring organisation and I spent quite a while going through my books, my journals and all matter of printed material related to sport psychology. Whilst doing this a couple of things come to my mind that I thought was good ‘blog material’. First, I was amazed at just how much information about sport psychology there is and how the more specific scientific information we have can actually have the opposite effect (i.e. information overload despite the information being excellent). There is definitely such as things as too much of a good thing.


The second pondering was why, in the presence of all this information about how to help performers via mental conditioning, some many people with this job still guess based on their own experiences. It can’t be cost as the peer reviewed journals in sport psychology are easily accessible via most university libraries. I believe the reason is that the real experts best suited to dealing with everyday concepts like motivation and attitude and how to response to adversity are outnumbers by those who think their individual experience in these areas are empirically valid.

Unfortunately from a scientific point of view they are not and it’s a bit like trusting a pill your mate made in his garage to help with a headache rather than taking an aspirin. One might work if you get lucky (and could have the opposite effect if you’re unlucky) while the other one will work as long as you follow the directions.

Use of time - The Holy Grail

Twice a week I drive to Campbelltown and back to lecture. The combined driving time is 3 hours per week or 42 hours over a 14 week semester. Rather than simply listening to garbage on the radio I have one of these great little gadgets that allows me to tune my MP3 player to the car radio and I use the time to listen to a number of audio recording that will, in my opinion, make me a better sport psychologist. These include audio books (try “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell), audio recordings of my own sessions to listen for ways to improve as well as sessions of Condor Performance’s other consultants. Arguably the most important mental skill of them all is how you use the 168 hours we have in a week and it is not surprisingly that so many of the ideas we pass onto athletes and performers are designed to improve the quality and quantity of TIME. Are you doing the right things, for the right length of times, in the right order, at the right time of day with the right people in the right way?

The Motivation Myth

One of the odd things about our work is we come across certain words a lot and we’re often amazed at how they are misused or misunderstood. From this list the undisputed king is the concept of ‘motivation’. I often explain the myth that some of us have more of it than others with a little story. Imagine we knew someone who spent all day, every day sitting at home on the couch watching TV and eating chips.

It would be tempting to call this person unmotivated, wouldn’t it?

But we’d be wrong. In fact the couch potato is a highly motivated individual albeit towards activities you and I might not think are very productive. The fact is, until we die, we all have the same amount of motivation and it’s the direction of these efforts (eg. choice of how we spent our time) that differs from one person to the next. Have a think about that the next time you hear or use the terms motivated / motivator / motivation.
Cheers, GJM
PS – feel free to comment on the above or make suggestions of future posts by submitting comments below.