Pressure Training with Jolan Kegelaers | KoopCast Episode 169

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast builds off of our previous two episodes that have been all about mental skills for ultra running i have a treat in store for the audience today because because it is about a very specific mental skill that we probably don't associate enough with trail and ultra running and that is this skill of being able to perform under pressure recent paper caught my eye the title of it is pressure makes diamond diamonds a narrative review on the application of pressure training in high performance sports this paper was written by yolan kegelars i have been familiar with his work for a number of years in the area of pressure training and also athlete resiliency and it was an absolute treat to bring him on the podcast to go over this concept of pressure training and speculate on how we might actually do this in an endurance and in an ultra marathon setting in order to improve performance with that as a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with yolan kegelars all about pressure training and how we might apply it to trail and ultra running

thanks for taking the time i appreciate a lot thanks for the invitation yeah incidentally um when this paper i'll probably mention this in the intro but when this paper came up as you as the lead author i had this like scratch at the back of my brain i'm like i know this author from like somewhere and it was some of the previous stuff that i kind of brought into that last like email exchange okay so i i've appreciated your work um i live in it just is a little bit of a background i live in colorado springs colorado where the olympic training center is and we've had a lot of influence from the training center just on my coaching career and this a lot of the the the things that you've uh previously written about has kind of come up in these elite athlete transitions from their career to a normal life and things like that and when we counsel those athletes and work with the kind of the coaches and the team that are around those athletes we're constantly drawing stuff on that so i'm very appreciative of wow nice yeah thanks thanks that's that's always nice to hear i mean you write these papers and you you send them out there into the world and it's sometimes hard to to see as an academic to which extent the these these works are being picked up so it's it's always nice to hear that and you know what's really funny so since doing this podcast which is about three years old now

i've gotten that sentiment a lot from a lot of the researchers in the field they're like hey we put these these things these things out and a lot of times we kind of like don't know the impact i can i can tell you that at least in my in my circle and my coaching circle and the athlete circle that i work with which i mean now this is the proverbial niche of an inch of a niche in ultra marathon world but even if we expand it out to the olympic sports it gets drawn on more so than i think most researchers appreciate because this stuff gets passed around especially now on social media and pulled up in conferences and you're not going to get like text messages alerts every time you get cited in some zoom meeting or something like that so keep keep cranking it out as well nice i mean that that's very kind of very nice to hear i mean in the end it's what we do it for uh let's try to have some some sort of a positive impact so the audience can get to know you a little bit better as we're speaking off air i've i've been familiar with your work uh for a long period of time but the audience probably is not going to be just because of how lay the audience is and where your work kind of stays within a professional circle i guess is what i say professional circle of like coaches and practitioners and athletes can you explain to the audience just a little bit more about who you are and how you got interested in your work and what it's currently focused on yeah sure um so my my background is in clinical psychology i have an education as a psychologist but i was always very very interested

also for my own athletic career um in sports and at a really early stage in my development it kind of pushed me towards this sports psychological research but always with with the clinical insight as well so a lot of the work that i do looks at mental health well-being in sports and how we can balance that with optimal performances and actually in my PhD i looked at the development of psychological resilience in athletes so how can we make athletes stronger better in dealing with some of those negative or challenging situations that they might experience within their career but very importantly there was through the lens of the coach so not me as a psychologist but rather what can the coach do in their day-to-day interactions with athletes in order to help them deal or manage some of these these negative situations from that several research themes kind of emerged and and one of those themes was what i think the topic of pressure training which we will talk a little bit more about today and i've been fascinated with this topic mainly as an observer of elite sport and not just endurance sport we're gonna have to broaden the lens out to to kind of all sport and mainly stick and ball sports and then i think we're going to have a little bit of a interpretive discussion on how it might apply to endurance or actually ultra marathon but the the the reason that i've become fascinated is is there's always been this lore around athletes who can perform in the clutch right the michael jordans

the kobe bryants if you're you know a basketball fan the tom brady's if you're a football fan that if you know if you give them a shot to win the game at the end of a game that they're gonna do it like you just have faith because you've seen them do it time and time and time again and they have some sort of quality about them that enables them or allows them to succeed in those in those types of environments and then when you contrast that with the opposite right the athletes that choke for whatever reason they get the game winning free throw at the very end of the you know at the end of the game and they you know and they and they miss it it creates this really fascinating dialogue because there are you know we divide things into wins and losses a lot in sports right and when something something of that magnitude comes down to something that's relatively small or simple across the course of entire game and entire match it becomes a subject uh it becomes a subject of a discussion so the main thing that we're going to talk about is is like you said this paper that you wrote uh pressure creates diamonds is should we intentionally include these pressure inducing types of activities i'm gonna let you expand upon that definition because you're the expert but should we intentionally include these in training what are the potential positive outcomes of it what are the potential negatives outcomes and how should we orchestrate it as a whole so i'll i'll kind of like turn the floor over to you let's start to set some definitions of this pressure training up first so that we can all kind of speak on the same

you know speak the same language so to speak yeah i mean it sounds good um it's already a bit of a challenge because we call the pressure training but if you look in the literature you're going to see a lot of different names being thrown around it's being referred to as well as pressure neuron training anxiety training acclimatization training so i think a good important starting point is to recognize that there is no singular form of pressure training but what we did try to see is in all these different kind of approaches what are some of the common features that we a lot of times see and i think two very important characteristics stand out if you want to speak about pressure training the one is as you mentioned it's it's having some sort of a very purposeful practice manipulation in a way to create some sort of pressure or maybe more accurately a little bit of a stress response so kind of seeing if we can create situations in practice that kind of simulate or emulate some some sort of stress that they might also experience within their actual performance context so that's the very first important important feature of pressure training the second feature that we see is that it also includes some sort of a execution of task relevant skills because as i said sometimes it's being referred to as acclimatization training but we kind of see that it's not enough to just

experience stress it's stress but then also working on the tasks that you need to be working on so it's executing tasks under stress situations winning sports so that's the the broad the broad conceptualization of pressure training let's say interestingly within that we also saw that this kind of pressure training has been used for several different type of tasks as you kind of mentioned there's there's the whole choking literature executing a very well defined sports specific task taking a shot shooting a penalty in football can we use pressure training for that but then we also see another smaller section of the literature that really tries to see us pressure training as a way to develop broader coping skills can we use it to learn to deal with a lot of different types of situations so not just a very very narrowly defined uh task sports specific skill but rather a broader set of potentially stressful situations so that's the broad idea of this this pressure training and so let's kind of bring it to brass tacks because coaches have used this even without knowing the literature right and and and and a lot of this is is just kind of game simulation right is the way that they have maybe unintentionally done some of this type of training we want to do a two-minute drill in football we want to practice the last sequence of an inbound i use football about basketball analogies a lot so you're going to have

to get used to them we can bring in we can bring in football uh european football or soccer in a little bit but i'm particularly going to use american football and basketball analogies we're going to we're going to practice i have a i have a background in basketball as well so that's that's fine for me uh we'll do we'll do basketball a lot um we're going to practice this particular out of bounds sequence that we're going to see at the end of the game it's going to we're going to move the ball to half court there's going to be three seconds on the clock this is how it's actually going to look and as i mentioned coaches have been doing this and teams have been doing this type of training without really attaching uh the kind of the vocabulary that we're using this kind of like pressure training to it or at least they're including elements of it right so how would those two situations kind of be similar or different simply rehearsing something that might happen during a you know a very important sequence during a game and then deliberately doing something so that it includes these these elements of having a stress response and executing the task correctly what's the difference in those types of activities yeah it's a really good point you raise and and i agree that this is not necessarily something completely new that that we invented and actually the the reason that we wanted to publish this paper is to start giving a little bit more nuance and a little bit more detail into some of the practices that might be already out there that a lot of coaches are using

i think a lot of the examples that you give arguably could be classified under pressure training so if we're looking at at some game simulation and we're including specific elements to kind of elicit some of those responses i would probably call that pressure training as well what was for us really really important is to to look have a more nuanced look at what's the context around pressure training that might make that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't what are some of the outcomes that you want to look at what are some of the other factors that you want to have around that that practice session in order to have the maximum effect maybe looking at what are some of the dangers what are some of the downsides that might be also associated so i think the idea is not new it's just trying to have a little bit more nuanced and more detailed insight into what might be going on so let's get into that little bifurcation between what works and maybe three categories right what's work what works what is probably less effective or not effective and then what's deleterious right because you you bring up in your paper that there are times where a lot of these practices are actually not at the benefit of an athlete and probably make them worse or less capable of performing said task in that type of environment let's start with the first one and then we'll kind of like move down the scale when is it particularly effective like how can we orchestrate activities like this in any sport

you can pick basketball to so that they are effective yeah i mean it we we can we can break this down um but in essence it's about doing it very purposefully very deliberately so having a very clear goal in mind as a coach why are you setting this up like what are some of the skills what are some of the techniques what are some of the performances that you want to see in your athletes so starting from that then trying to have an analysis of what is the actual situation look like in the real life performance environment what are some of the triggers that might make my athletes stressed that might hamper the performance of my athletes so really trying to pinpoint those and then based on those trying to look for very specific practice manipulations we call them plan disruptions very specific disruptions that try to simulate specific elements of those real life situations so it's really having a strong idea about what is going on and how can we simulate this and and i think that's already a very important first side because a lot of times when i see coaches who try to implement these or i speak with them and say yeah but i'm doing a long time but this very target element is sometimes lacking they just think we have to create the pressure and then pressure will will take care of itself and it will make our athletes more mentally tough and make them more resilient and we can have an all the whole other discussion around what's the difference between the two but it's going really in detail

like what are the specific simulations and then i think a final very important aspect is looking at at how can we reflect afterwards and again this is something that i see a lot of times with coaches is that this reflection moment afterwards is kind of forgotten about coaches again think that the pressure will take care of itself we have the pressure session it's over okay on to the next one no maybe then it only starts can you then have a discussion with your athlete okay what happened yeah what were some of the triggers that that occurred how did you respond to those did that help you yes or no what can we do different next time so really trying to break it down into those different steps rather than just creating the pressure i think that's a very important part of the solution into how this pressure training can be more effective you know i was reminded of this as you were going through this i was reminded of this conversation that i uh that i read with michael phelps's longtime coach bob bowman who would use things like this in kind of a way that you were describing in the way that this conversation kind of panned out as they were just asking him you know what he was doing with michael and there's this one very small piece of it most people focus on like how many pancakes he eats and all this trivial stuff there's one there's one really small part of it where he said listen sometimes before we were doing a really important workout or a time trial or something like that i would take his goggles off of his head and smash them on the side of the pool deck and just let him let him deal

with it and the the important part with that conversation as you started to allude to is what did you then do afterwards yeah you could probably have dealt with that in the meantime and you know maybe your heart rate response was different or you kind of negatively reacted to whatever it was but the but first off making the actual training exercise deliberate i'm going to do this specifically at during something that's a meaningful workout or a meaningful time trial and then after that is all said and done we're going to talk about how did you react how did you course correct and what's the translatable thing in the actual field of play and i remember him very specifically saying that is unlikely to happen in an olympic event nobody is going to take michael's swimming goggles off of his head right before the olympic you know butterfly final and smash them on the side of the pool but i could do that from a training activity in order to give him the skills to cope with something that might happen in it that might happen with a similar flavor the finals get delayed there's some sort of like instance at the pool some physical altercation that actually you know might happen uh during the warm-ups or something like that those training activities are not necessarily to prepare for that specific action they're prepared they're they're they're they're designed to prepare the athlete for a whole host of things that we may not be able to predict that could happen at a at a very critical point in olympic final or something

like that yeah absolutely and and i really like that you you take this example because it's it's one that i also often used when when i was presenting my PhD a couple of years ago and actually what you said like no one is gonna smash the goggles but i think during one of these olympic finals actually his goggles started with water so yeah yeah it did help but what i i really like about this example as well is that it kind of illustrates a whole process that you can go through you can start by having these kind of discussions with your athlete and what might happen what are some of the the things that might happen that can really disrupt you and then if you listen to a lot of interviews with michael phelps himself as well he also kind of uses this this visualization um he visualizes these these potential negative situations so he was already practicing this mentally how he would respond and then if you then start adding these these disruptions to see if the things that you discussed about the things that you try to imagine how you would respond are those are also actually the things that you're doing within practice and and then based on that again you can start having these conversations with your athletes so i think it really nicely shows that it's more than just creating this this this one pressure situation it's about the whole process that goes comes before and comes after and and i think you're absolutely right that that sometimes it's about developing some sort of a coping repertoire we know that it can help for very very specific tasks for

example free throw shooting penalty shooting but it might also be like you said developing these coping skills that might then be used for a broader range of potential setbacks just knowing that you have let's say a deck of cards in your hand that you can pick and choose from at the right time so you know okay i have these skills in in hand i can i can deal with these kind of situations so let's move to the potentially deleterious ones because this is an area that kind of fascinates me i mean as a coach you know not to compare ourselves with medical physicians but we kind of take a do no harm approach like we need to be incorporating interventions whether it's a physical intervention like how much you should be running or your strength training routine or whatever they're very minimum they're not going to be worse they should be getting the athlete better but i do think that this is an area where despite our best intentions that coaches can really kind of like go awry and it kind of like mess things up for an athlete what are some examples or some things that you've actually seen in practice that that that we should be avoiding yeah i mean really really important point um uh let's say starting with the most extreme situation the whole idea of pressure training might be abused as an excuse to set up really harmful abusive practice context i think nowadays they're very rightfully a lot of attention for how are we dealing with our athletes are we providing a safe and healthy environment in the wrong hands

i'm aware that pressure training might be misused really abusive coaches that that just excuse it as as a way to say well i need to create pressure for my athletes that's just how it is i think we can agree that's not what pressure training is about so if we set aside this this very harmful abusive practice context even if the coaches use pressure training in well-intentioned ways with with specific aims in mind there might be still some negative effects that can occur we know that if we create this kind of pressure it's highly likely that our athletes will feel frustrated or annoyed at times is that all always the the biggest problem maybe not but we at least have to be aware of that and also give them the the tools to to deal with that frustration in more extreme cases we've also seen that it might actually hurt the relationship with the coach one of the coaches we worked with in one of our studies he said that i i did this period of pressure training it was actually quite successful but it really harmed my relationship with some of my athletes they they feel that they can't trust me anymore so in that relationship there might be some some things that that could potentially go wrong some of the other things that we see is that if if you create certain pressure situations that for example

really rely on fatiguing your athletes it could potentially lead to a bigger risk of injury so that's something to take into account it could also potentially lead to to some burnouts some authors have suggested that might be the more extreme cases and another thing is that if you create a lot of situations where athletes have to deal with this pressure and these negative experiences and they don't have a lot of success in in dealing with those it might actually need to avoidance behavior so rather than you want them to see to deal with it in the right way they start doing a lot of things to avoid those kind of situations because they have such such bad experiences and then finally if if you do it within a team context let's say it might also create this this situation where you create a lot of pressures you see who which athletes deal with that then that pressure well and you start focusing on these these get a lot of attentions a lot of attention and maybe some of the other athletes start gaining less attention and they start getting left behind and you sort of create this kind of sink or swim culture so those might all be potentially um negative effects to look out for when when implementing pressure training i want to specifically kind of focus on the coach athlete relationship piece because this is more satiating my coaching you know uh knowledge than anything else but i've whenever i've tried

to do this with athletes one of my personal bigger hesitations with it is knowing that there's a high probability for failure and i'm not saying that that's bad you want to put your athletes from time to time at a certain frequency and i don't profess to know what that frequency actually is right at a certain frequency you kind of want them to get to that point of failure just one just as a normal physiological process but two just to kind of teach them that they can deal with it you know either whether it's in a workout situation or race situation that is translated from a workout situation but i've always had a difficult time with this setup we're going to do this it potentially has a negative outcome this is why we're doing it and especially when things are going really good right when things are going really good now you're introducing this thing that kind of has the potential not to derail the program but to at least stop the momentum and so i'm wondering what you would think about just about that specific relationship piece if we can dive into that a little bit better like how can coaches that are listening to this podcast that want to do something like this how can they set the situation up for success i mean that that's uh that's a very tricky question and there are a couple of things i would i would definitely take into account one the way you approached it is also what i would recommend start by also having this conversation start by kind of framing what you're going to do there are going to be times that it's going to be more tough we're going

to create some additional pressure give them a little bit of context like why are we doing this it has a very clear developmental goal it's it's not as a way to annoy our athletes or or just to be mean or to create some some chaos no there's a very specific purpose so so being very clear about that purpose another thing to consider is can we involve our athletes within this process and and this is it's it's a little bit of a tricky one because on the one hand letting athletes for example set some of their own consequences that's a way to create pressures is setting consequences some forfeits some rewards letting athletes think about okay what would be a relevant consequence for me might give them some autonomy might give them some some buy-in into the whole process on the other hand sometimes the pressure is created by doing something very unexpected so that's that's a trade-off to consider as well letting them have buy-in letting them be aware of what's going on but then at the same time maybe undermining some of those those effects because they're aware that something is going to happen so that's that's something to kind of consider and to balance and then i think the reflection part at the end is also very important you frame it in the beginning and you come back to it in the end like okay why did we do this i i made sure that you felt really uncomfortable in situation in this situation

but why did i do this how did you respond yeah what did you do what lessons can we learn from this i think that's that's an important part of framing this for your athletes i think one of the things i'm taking away from this is this is probably something i'm going to change as i or alter as i start to do this or things like this with more athletes is to be very methodical on the front end and say this is something you might experience during a race and we're going to get to this in a second we're going to go down the hypothetical rabbit hole and i know this is a ultra marathon isn't your wheelhouse so i'll help out as i can this is something you might experience during a race because you might experience during this during a race this is a skill i want you to develop here's how we're going to develop it in practice and with the specific activity and also the frequency and things like that and here what is pro here's what might happen afterwards right kind of like laying out the whole chain of events in advance which kind of reduces the pressure so to speak right and we're talking about creating pressure but kind of reduces it because then they know what to expect but i think just from uh setting the table perspective that deliberate sequence of events is is is at least something that i'm gonna i'm gonna make more robust yeah i i'd say spot on um maybe maybe two things to to add there one is when when laying this out you can maybe also reflect back on two previous experiences that they had drawing back

on that okay what what happened in the last race what what were some of your difficult points so giving them a voice as well in in setting out some of those those goals and then the other part was okay they might expect some things going on but then it's up to you as a coach to do you want to let them know a lot or do you want to just give them the general idea and then keep specific interventions to surprise them let's say so you don't have to necessarily lay out the whole track of what's going to happen but just have them buy into the general idea yeah i'm a i'm a less surprises not more surprises kind of guy so you're not going to see me smashing athletes goggles on the side of a pool and unannounced but uh i could definitely see and that's that's a little bit of my temperament right knowing that you're by setting the table in such a deliberate and obvious fashion it kind of takes a little bit of the oomph out of the intervention right because they know what's coming and they kind of get a little bit of a heads up but personally i'm kind of willing to deal with that compromise because it's so novel for a lot of athletes right and whenever you have a really novel intervention it doesn't have to be perfect because just for the fact of it being novel it's going to result in some sort of some sort of improvement let's go down the theoretical rabbit hole i'm sure you've been like painstakingly staying up all night trying to think about this translation but we're going to wade into it and i just came up with the way we're going to wade into it uh we're going to start out with a track and field example that

i'm familiar with and then we're going to start to go into the endurance example and then potentially an ultra marathon example so this is a personal one for me i i ran at baylor university uh for a couple of years um in the late 90s and this was in michael johnson's heyday right so clide hart was the head track coach he was super genius we had i very distinctly remember this we had nine out of the top 12 400 meter runners in the world on the same track at the same time doing the exact same workout and my knucklehead 18 or 19 year old did not appreciate that nearly to the extent that i appreciate having that experience now but one of the training activities that clyde would the coach hart would would consistently do across all of those athletes is they would do these relay style intervals so in order to fit everybody on the track we can't start and stop everybody you know at the same time so he would stage he would stage people at basically 200 meter increments and do 400 meter uh basically relay style intervals with those athletes or sorry 200 meter relay style intervals with those athletes with both the men and the women so everybody's carrying around batons everybody's doing these 200 meter repeats there's the rotation is kind of set based on how many people are on your team and one of the things that i now have seen that those athletes got out of that and i can't profess to

how deliberate to our conversation earlier coach hart was being about this but one of the things that those athletes got out of that is because of all the people on the track and the fact that both genders were on the track at the same time there was this chaotic nature of when you had to start and stop your interval because there's always a baton pass off and you're always switching around where you're supposed to be in the lanes just like you would in a four by 400 meter uh event in real time but the fact that it was practiced so often you could see that chaotic nature of the intervals weren't actually perfect because there was all this you know horse trading essentially going on during the workout itself with who's supposed to line up where and then evidently you know inevitably a baton would fly off of the track because people would collide or whatever and those athletes always did really well at the 400 meters because they were the best in the world at it but also at the relays they always performed very very well at the relays because the the chaotic nature which is novel to a lot of athletes of the exchanges was just so they were just so kind of accustomed to it so that's a situation that i that i kind of personally experienced in track and field that i could actually see that there's uh some some some benefit from but let's weigh down the track waters a little bit further into the endurance events right 1500 meter 5000 meter 10 000 meter and things like that how could you see some of these activities playing out within those specific disciplines well

there's there's a couple of things and and i guess it boils down to what we said in the beginning what's the specific game is it is it the the context of the competition itself do you have athletes that have a lot of performance anxiety before a competition at the start of a competition so that might be one one way to start uh working on some of those things if that's the case you might start looking at okay how can we simulate some of those those conditions that that evoke some of that the performance anxiety can we start creating competitions between athletes within the training set so can we let maybe keep some score over over a practice session or over multiple practice sessions where we have different kind of competitions and we have a ranking and then people can see where they stand so that might be already one way to start implementing some of that pressure we can then start looking at can we attach some consequences to that competition and the very typical example of consequences are our physical forfeits so we have a competition and the loser does some some push-ups or does some extra laps i'm not really a big fan of that traditional way of approaching it but you might think of it a little bit more creatively we've seen examples of coaches who said well the losers of this small competition they clean up the gym or they clean up the pitch and then the winners can go get a shower or the losers they prepare a dinner for the winners at one point so

you can start getting a little bit more creative in that um seeing some research where they had the some athletes perform a song or a poem um for their for their fellow athletes just as a way to be a little bit more creative in it um as long as it doesn't go too extreme of course yeah you can then also start looking at can we maybe do something with the environment um can we go to an environment that really simulates the context where where some of those performances might happen can we rather than practicing on a practice pitch if we have access to a big stadium practicing the big stadium just to that they can be aware of how that feels to be in that stadium to walk in if it's the stadium where actually the big events is going to take place that's even better um we also see sometimes that coaches really try to look for some locations that are quite challenging in and of themselves and and one of the examples that i that i love to use is is a national team coach in in the netherlands actually who was preparing and this was a team sport who was preparing his team for the world cups and the world cups were organized in the country of their biggest rivals so they were the the tournament favorite and then the they were going to go to the the home court of their biggest rivals and so they kind of thought in advance like what's going to happen probably the people are going to do

everything in their power to disrupt us both during the events but also maybe at night at our hotel so as a way to prepare his athletes he took them um on a training camp to i i think it was istanbul doesn't matter where but they put him into a bad hotel where there was next to construction site so they started at six in the morning they started working drilling so all the athletes were sleeping badly then they put him on the bus they had to drive another an hour to the other side of the city for their their practice events so their practices they had some local schools that were being brought in to be loud and annoying next to the pitch all as a way to prepare his athletes for what they might experience later on so based on that you can start looking at what is it specifically that that might be going on and how can i start simulating some of those those specific stresses i want to ask a tangential question to the situation that you just mentioned and because they're going to be a lot of um athletes and a lot of coaches out there that start to formulate these things in their head based off of the kind of the guidance that you've just given and a reasonable reaction to that is whatever you are designing represents some type of deviation from the perfect physical workout right absolutely yeah and is and it could be a robbing peter to pay paul right you're robbing the physiological peter you're reducing the

physiological outcome of that particular session for this mental training for this kind of like pressure training and what is your viewpoint on like how much is how much that compromise is actually worth can we can we wrap some general like guidelines around that yeah i mean for one you're absolutely right it's it's a trade-off it's it's a disruption we call it the plan disruption it's a disruption of what you would ideally be doing a lot of times um where that trade-off lies i think that probably depends a lot of times on the context for example if i now go to my own sport in basketball um i might be a basketball coach and i say i have an athlete who shoots 50 free throws during the game that's too low i'm gonna increase pressure but maybe that same athlete only shoots 55 during practice so not that much better so probably my time would be better spent on creating some skills there developing those skills um just purely from a technical perspective same might go from from a physical perspective so that's probably part of the the art of a good coach is seeing where that balance is i think what's also important to mention is that pressure training should not be continuously implemented and we also see some research that pressure training is really useful really helpful to improve performances under pressure they don't improve performances when there is no pressure so it's it's you're still looking towards

the combination or a balance of those pressurized situations in practice probably in a smaller amount and then larger portions of non-pressurized training okay so let's move into the ultra marathon world and this is uh this is this is my wheelhouse so i can lead the dance and then you can comment and criticize and tell you know kind of tell me how to help tell me how to adapt this and i just came up with this example or this this activity kind of on the spot um so it's a little bit roughed in what so one of the con and what i want to try to do is is to try to find a real-time example of how we would actually do something like this but more importantly to set the framework so that any athlete any coach you can kind of say okay i don't want to take coop's cheeky example but i'm going to take these elements and come up with something that that i can do so one of the most common and i'm going to use the word choke point it's not the right word but one of the most common choke points that i see athletes go through during races is when their expected nutrition at an aid station is not there so the aid station runs out of water or electrolyte drink mix or the perfect flavored gels that they you know have on the table they like chocolate there's no chocolate there there's only strawberry or this this actually happens a lot their crew doesn't show up with their planned nutrition and the effect of their crew not showing up

is met it is an order of magnitude a greater deleterious effect than what that crew was actually supposed to provide like it's it's kind of remarkable how how this negatively affects athletes and it shouldn't do that so the activity that i came up with to do this is to basically blind your nutrition for your long runs so set out your nutrition in sealed bags that you can't see through for the next two weeks and have one of those be the nutrition that'll work but the flavors that you hate all of the flavors that you find the most repugnant you know repulsive things that you would like never take on a day-to-day basis and you don't know what you're going to get until you dig into the bag for your first gel and then you know your whole day is going to be your whole day is going to be compromised with these terrible gels that you that that that work they're just as effective as everything else but you just don't simply that you just don't simply enjoy them and then the reflection on the back side of that is is you can deal like you you're going to get through that activity and you're going to be fine you're going to be bummed initially but you can deal so i'll open it up to you you've seen these across a lot of coaches and things like that specifically with this situation what do you think about that where would you make your alterations and what are some of the blind spots that we would be looking at i mean it sounds

like a like a a nice example one of the initial thoughts i had is okay what is what is the consequence when when this thing goes wrong when the aid station there's not the the food that that they expected or the crew is not there like what are the what are the consequences of that athlete how are they responding um so that would probably be an important thing to then at the end gauge if your pressure training was kind of effective or not yeah it's where you starting to see similar kind of events going on or is the situation so different i mean the example that you gave sounds um logical to me but probably you have to test it in practice to see how are my athletes responding if you then start seeing some of those same responses you can then start saying okay hey what's going on here like what are your emotions what are your clinicians so what what thoughts are going on uh how do you are how are you behaving in this moment what is the consequence of your your thoughts emotions behavior on your performance like is it really start to hampering your performance yes or no and then what can we do different in in the future so the closer that some of those responses lie to what you would actually see in practice the better you can start matching those reflections to to what you would normally see there's i mean there's almost i'm going to use a neuromuscular term there's almost a repeated bout effect right that you have to kind of like

do that intervention i not frequently as you mentioned earlier but a few times and then you're you're gauging the improvement by the athlete's response it first time i hated things i wanted to throw these things immediately in the trash i wanted to do my entire run without them second run i didn't react as negatively i you know literally sucked it up and choked them down and i was totally fine like that type of reflection from a repeated standpoint from repeating the intervention a few times or several times it seems like is an important part of it as you said to see if the intervention is actually having some sort of positive effect yeah i think so and if you start doing it multiple times you can also start looking at in between can we develop certain specific mental skills that that would help in dealing with the situation and can you support the athlete in that for example in in this situation it might be part acceptance it might be part self-talk teaching the athletes to talk to themselves to kind of confident comfort them like okay this is gonna be okay i can deal with it i i have done this before in other situations it might be other mental skills that might be important you might help them visualize certain certain difficult situations you might help them develop certain routines work on their breathing breathing or do some breathing exercise but like using these moments in between pressure training might be really helpful to to develop some of those tools that then can be used later on to deal with some of

those other situations so just as a note for the listeners my previous two podcasts with uh dr justin ross and one of our coaches neil palace we touched on their mental skills framework that they use for their athletes and the different types of mental skills and how they kind of basically progress throughout the season and i think if you listen to those two kind of in concert with this podcast with the context that you just provided you can see how those skills can easily marry up with this type of activity because essentially you're using and deploying those skills within the activity itself which acts as a point of reinforcement yeah absolutely this a lot of times i see pressure training as as a way to test some of the mental skills that you might have developed in another context yeah you might be working with a psychologist or you might do some group workshops and there's still a big gap from working in those sessions to the actual performance context and for pressure training might help you do is have some sort of a an in-between step to start practicing some of those those mental skills start mastering those mental skills so that they are better um known and mastered when there's the actual performance context the translation to the field of play with the mental skills i simultaneously have always found it the hardest for athletes and coaches to conceptualize how that translation is going to occur so i'm working on this

in practice or even like a lot of the mental skills you're working on not even while you're running right or not even while you're performing the physical activity you're meditating and doing things like that and sometimes conceptualizing that that how they translate is is is difficult for athletes um and so incorporating them deliberately in some activities helps that trend helps that translation tremendously yeah absolutely and and i think again there this this reflection point at the end might be really useful to kind of very deliberately and explicitly bring it back to some of the skills that they might have learned before and you might have a reflection point okay you are not dealing so well with this challenge but remember what you learned before what did you learn about controlling your breathing or what did you learn about having certain mantras certain self-talk that that might help you in those situations so that might might help you making that very explicit bridge okay so one of the things i want to transition to is it's related to some other work that you have done but i also think that there's a big venn diagram overlap between pressure training we're going to make this transition to next which is resilience and this quality that we can bring out in athletes and also ultra running like we kind of pride ourselves on being very resilient people we're you know persevering despite the duration and the environment and all

these different things kind of like conspiring against us and there's all these tales of lore about you know how runners finish this race despite you know all the headwinds that they that they kind of faced so it's interesting from our particular sport because because of that but first can you set off like what is this quality of resilience within athletes and then we can talk about how pressure training might actually foster it particularly in an ultra marathon environment yeah sure and and maybe it's interesting to kind of contrast resilience with the concept of mental toughness which is also um receiving a lot of attention yep again the academic in me will say there's different perspectives and there might definitely be people who are disagreeing with me but in general mental toughness is often viewed as sort of almost a trait like innate quality you have certain characteristics that make you able to deal with some of those challenging events you're able to persevere you're you're comfortable in those uncomfortable situations it's really something that you have almost like a trait like quality resilience is much more about the process of adapting so when we talk about resilience we talk about a process what's the distinction well where mental toughness is much more about some of those innate qualities that you have all the time even if there's no challenging situations resilience much more looks at how do you draw upon some of those maybe innate qualities but also how are you drawing upon the

resources that you might have in your environment i think that that balance between both internal and external resources is very important when we talk about resilience so it might be that you're very perseverant you're very tough but if your environment doesn't help you in dealing with some of those difficult situations you might still not be able to demonstrate resilience so it's also about do you have the support are you drawing upon your support do you have a a coach that that's there to help you in those difficult situations so looking at where that balance lies that that's often what we find is really important in resilience and what might distinguish it a little bit from mental toughness you know i i i i really appreciate that distinction right there because we tend to be solo athletes right it's there these are endeavors we go kind of go out by ourselves or with a small group and we we pride ourselves on kind of being self-reliant but the fact that this resilience component has an element with it where you're having to draw part of the solutions to whatever problems from external outside of you whether that's a person or gas station or you know people at the aid station and things like that and learning those skills of how other people can help you like help me help you right is the phrase that goes around a lot i i i think is i noticed that in athletes the ones that that have that that particular quality will consistently kind of

perform above their pay grade so to speak because they're leveraging those assets around them yeah absolutely and and i think i referred to in the beginning the research i did in my PhD was on looking what what can the coach do to support um the athlete and one of the things we saw there is just purely the quality of the the coach athlete relationship is one of the the most important factors um so the the skills the interpersonal skills of the coach to establish such a good working relationship a little bit the empathy and the emotional and challenges of of the coach to kind of understand like how is my athlete dealing and when are they doing well when might they be struggling just to be there to to also they don't always have to offer the solutions just in the right time recognizing okay i just give a signal i'm here for you and and that might be one of the most important factors when we talk about about resilience just just having that person there you know it's funny so once again i'll bring in a personal anecdote i'm here the canary islands the the trans grand canary is going to start in five hour five and a half hours from now it's a midnight start and i'm here supporting a chinese athlete who speaks no english and so his wife who's also serving as his translator is here and when i was mentioning this to a colleague one of the first things they said is well how are you going to communicate within you know the aid stations and

kind of blah blah blah how are you going to give them advice right during how are you going to coach them right during the event and of course i'm going to work through the translator and things like that but what i said is like listen i just want to demonstrate that i'm here first that despite the fact that he doesn't speak english despite the fact that we have to go through the translator despite the fact that we're literally on opposite sides of the worlds and things like that to enhance the coach athlete relationship i'm just going to be here i'm going to make my presence known i'm going to drive to these aid stations in the middle of the night hand the dude a gel which is probably the most like trivial task you can like ask somebody to do i'm going to hand him a gel but that improvement in that quality of the relationship is going to be paid forward and all the other things that we're going to do kind of throughout the year yeah i mean exactly and and from a psychological perspective i guess as a coach you have to give a lot of of input but sometimes just being there for someone and just i would say having a listen but even even in chinese it's it's not about the verbal communication it's it's probably more about the non-verbal communication just just being there for that individual is super important when it comes to resilience yeah 100 okay so i'm going to leave the floor to you to to kind of wrap up with for the ultroners that are out there listening that want to do something like this right we've given them the framework we've given them some ideas to start to you know ruminate on on things that they can actually do what's some just real practical step one step two if they want to deploy some training like this in their training tomorrow or

next week how do they dive off the diving board i i think a good first step is to have a think about from my experience from listening to other people what are some of the the situations that might happen and that might give me problems that might have a negative impact on my performance just have a think about like this what if scenarios what if this happens what would that look like what would be the impact and maybe also how how can i start um thinking about some potential solutions once you have that you can start thinking about okay what are specific elements of that that i might simulate my own practice or as a coach i might simulate for my athletes so are there specific elements that i can try to simulate a very typical comment that i get a lot when when working with coaches is that they say well you cannot ever simulate completely um the pressure or the anxiety or the stress that happens during competition that's true i you will never be able to to simulate that completely i will not be able to simulate the anxiety of shooting a penalty in the champions league final but we see that even simulating it a little bit even if it's it's just a little bit on the way to to what it might actually look like it can already help you in practicing some of those skills that later on will also help you in the real life situation so it's not just about having the exact same pressure or anxiety it's about having a

little bit of that pressure and then practicing the right skills that can help you later on so that's that's also an important thing to take into account when designing this pressure it doesn't have to be all the way it's just help you a little bit on the way and then seeing what you can practice then can i interject just really quick before you get to that's the exact same as any other training activity you would do you never do the race before the race the race is always the hardest physical thing that you're going to do it's most of the times longer from a total physicality standpoint it's head and shoulders above any sort of training activity so i i i want the listeners to kind of appreciate that fact that that there that you just mentioned you don't have to create the intense the exact intense nature of the pressure within the training environment itself just like you would not try to recreate the physicality of the race within one training session it's the same concept yeah 100 yeah absolutely if i would then go to the the third step so first is having to think about what might happen second is how can we start simulating some of those things third step still conceptualizing what are some of the skills that might be needed to deal with this and that might be easier for a coach or a psychologist and for the athlete themselves but have a think about do i already have the competences to do this or might i need some some mental skills first yeah

is it better to first develop some routines again these breathing exercises some self-talk as a way to prepare myself for that i think when we then come to the implementation phase i would suggest starting progressively so not just jumping in the deep end but starting maybe with some small disruptions some some small kind of pressure situations see how the athletes are handling it see how you yourself are handling it based on that you can start evaluating okay am i doing well maybe i can increase the pressure a little bit more okay no this is not working maybe we should tone it down a little bit maybe develop some some other skills to deal with that so kind of having that back and forth between increasing pressure and and increasing support to to to help the athletes deal with that pressure it's progressive overload right it's progressive overload yeah it's progressive overload it's the same physical concept right you lift 20 pound barbell or 20 pound dumbbell one week and four weeks later you go to 25 pounds it's progressive overload it's the exact same thing exactly exactly and and then i would say that the final part of the puzzle is is that reflection part and and it's i mean i present it linearly here now but it's it's all related to each other of course but thinking about okay what happened not just it's the pressure but it's thinking about it afterwards and connecting back to what have we done before what can we do better and then i would say if you go through those steps and then i would be really interested to see to see what happens but i'm convinced that it will help

your athletes become better at dealing with pressure how about this when i throw this into the podcast space we will do like a call to action right now you can send me through my website or or they can contact you just through the links in the show notes whatever they've come up with and now you have a repertoire right a new sport of hey these are what these athletes yeah exactly i mean tried yeah it would be it would be really interesting yeah i'm curious to see it we'll do that we'll crowdsource it and maybe we'll do a follow-up and we can evaluate all these and and uh and grade them and see how they or maybe but yeah it's the other worked or not work um thank you very much for this conversation this was enlightening for me and like i said it was an honor for me because i've i've been familiar with a lot of your work for uh for a number of years and to actually get to discuss with the people who have actually done the research that i've admired for so long is is is quite a treat so so thank you for that where can the listeners find out a little bit more about you and your work yeah well first off thanks thanks for having me it was a was a pleasure being here and uh always nice to have these conversations um people can find me um on on twitter it's jolankeg which is j-o-l-a-n-k-e-g so that's my handle in twitter and they can find my work on research gate where it's jolankegelaars johan thank you for coming on the podcast man i hope our uh paths cross soon at some point yeah it would be nice thanks for having me all right folks there you have it there you go you can help this podcast out a lot by sharing it with

your friends and your training partners and giving it a rating or review on apple podcast that helps the podcast out very very much it's not the easiest thing you get yet to get to you have to go to apple podcast scroll all the way to the bottom write a review but i'm incredibly appreciative of each one of those reviews that come across the wire so thank you thank you thank you very much that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails