Using self-help interventions
Athletes crave interventions that improve
performance. Finding an intervention that works could involve working with a
professional sports scientist or following a self-help package. Recent years
has seen a rapid growth in the popularity in self-help interventions. Andy Lane
offers guidance on how to use self-help interventions to improve performance.
The
nature of sport is that individuals strive to find methods to improve
performance. Commercial activity to meet this demand has led to increased availability of products such as sports
drinks, supplements, equipment modification and numerous self-help books. In
this article, I focus upon the use of self-help materials designed to give an
athlete a psychological edge. However, at this juncture
it is worth noting that physiological, biomechanical, technical and nutritional
factors tend to work in tandem with psychological ones. Thus, anyone
considering using a self-help intervention should remember that changing one
aspect of performance could influence another. For example, in my experience
with endurance athletes, interventions that bring about improvements in
physiological indices that athletes see as important (lactic threshold, Vo2) are coupled with improvements in psychological ones.
What is a self-help intervention?
An
intervention occurs in a number of different ways. In other contexts, we might
see a different term being used. For example, if you
are feeling ill you could book an appointment at your local General Practitioner
(GP). Alternatively, if you have had the
illness before, and believe you have correctly identified it, you could take an
over-the-counter medication. You would judge the success of the intervention
(medication in this instance) by judging whether you no longer feeling ill. In
the interventions described in this article I use a
similar model;
1.
Identification of
the problem
2.
Implementation of
the intervention and establishment of criteria for judging effectiveness
3.
Assessment of its
effectiveness
In
the example above, the need for the intervention is signalled
by feeling unwell. The intervention is the treatment or, in this case,
medication. The assessment of effectiveness is whether the person no longer feels unwell. However, in sport psychology, the
problem itself can be difficult to identify; an athlete might want to perform
better but knowing which parts to work on is complex. In addition, assessing
the effectiveness can be difficult, especially as psychological data tend to be
subjective, an issue exacerbated by the fact that following a self-help
intervention, you are both the client and consultant.
Self-help interventions and sport
psychology: do they work?
There
is an extensive literature that describes how to use self-help
sport psychology interventions (1). I have contributed to this
literature including authoring 17 Peak Performance articles (see www.pponline.com), each one offering
self-help advice. How do I know if this is good advice? How do I know if the
interventions I propose work?
First,
the intervention should be supported by theory and tested
scientifically. What a scientific study can tell us is whether an
intervention has worked or not. An individual should rightly ask the question:
“if following intervention X improves performance, then how much should I
expect to improve after following it?” The key point is that when considering
whether to use a specific intervention, an individual should look for supporting
evidence.
The
evidence supporting the use of self-help psychological interventions is strong
and not restricted to sport (2). In clinical psychology, patients that followed
an online self-help intervention for the treatment of anxiety and depression
recovered as effectively as patients that worked with a therapist. In
education, students who used self-guided online materials learned as
effectively as students taught by attending traditional
lectures (3). In social psychology, participants following a self-help
intervention successfully learned to manage anxiety experience before giving
presentations (4). And in health psychology, self-help
interventions have helped people manage cravings when following diets (5). In
sport psychology, self-help interventions successfully led to runners not only experiencing
more pleasant emotions but also performing better (6). In summary, there is
evidence demonstrating that self-help interventions work.
So how do I develop an effective
self-help package?
Sir
Dave Brailsford coined the phrase “the aggregation of
marginal gains". He suggested that intervention work should involve
systematically identifying each small part that contributes to performance, and
then implement an intervention to change these, because collectively they can
make a large difference. The repeated success of GB cycling in the Olympics
bears testament for this approach. Of course, GB cycling had a whole team of
technical experts, coaches sport scientists and sports medics to help identify
where those margins could be gained. The question an
individual following a self-help intervention should ask her or himself is; "how do I identify where gains can be made"?
With self-help interventions, the individual is also a consultant, and therefore,
it is important to establish monitoring systems to enable identification of
factors that appear to influence performance.
Can I use my training diary as a way of assessing whether an
intervention is needed?
A training
diary can be a very effective way of identifying which variables to target for
intervention work. However, at least three factors influence the relative
success of using a training diary to help guide interventions. First, the diary
needs to capture important variables that influence performance and be open to
the possibility that you are not assessing the right information. An individual
following a self-help intervention needs to be open to new ideas and continue
reading widely. The individual is both the client and the consultant, and we
expect consultants to be professionals who keep up with the latest research.
Second, how
will you analyse data from your training diary? With
the data sitting in front of you, the key question is "how do I make sense
of it so that I know how my performance can be improved"?
When deciding what data to record, you should also consider what you will do with it. If you record time
spent training then presumably you will use this information to gauge whether it
was useful in helping you achieve your goal? If you believe that running long
periods of time, or completing certain distances, will help you achieve your
marathon goal, then seeing that you are running for longer is likely to improve
your confidence. However, if confidence is also influenced
by the relative intensity of each run, and you realise
that you are running for longer but at a lower intensity your confidence to be
able to run at the high intensity on race day may not necessarily be increased.
In the example above, the athlete should reflect on whether distance covered is
truly a marker of progress with a suggestion that speed needs to be considered and recorded. The key point here is to have a
strategy on how you will analyse data and how this
will relate to the relative achievement of your goals.
A third
factor to consider is that the act of keeping a training diary could be an
intervention itself, particularly for helping manage unwanted emotions. Keeping
a diary where you detail intense emotional experiences has
been found to be an effective self-help strategy (7). Expressive writing
is proposed to help process information better, and help
restructure information from these experiences in a way that if such a
situation arises next time, then they are better coped to deal with it (7).
Putting into practice
Assessing the important variables
Training
diaries for endurance athletes are aided by the use of
modern technology. You can get satellite navigation technology on your mobile phone
with numerous free apps available to help record and collate training. In this regard technology has provided a huge advantage in that it
takes away potential biases deriving from inaccurate measurement. Further, all you
need to do is put on the device, and press start and
stop to record training. Youdo not need to write down
what was done which brings in issues to do with the
accuracy of recall especially if you do not record what was done shortly after
the session.
In addition
to this type of data, I also suggest recording daily mood. Mood is a useful way
of recording how well you are coping with training demands (8). Mood can be
used to help balance your training so that you are recovered sufficiently so to
maintain quality. Figure 1 depicts a mood diary of a fatigued athlete where the
proposed intervention is recovery.
Figure 1: A
simple emotion diary for a fatigued athlete
Mood |
Not at all
|
A little |
Moderately |
Somewhat |
Very much
so |
|
Anxious |
|
|
|
L |
|
|
Calm |
|
L |
|
|
|
|
Happy |
|
L |
|
|
|
|
Sad |
|
|
|
L |
|
|
Dejected |
|
|
L |
|
|
|
Energetic |
L |
|
|
|
|
|
Fatigued |
|
|
|
|
L |
|
Excited |
|
L |
|
|
|
|
Still |
|
|
|
L |
|
|
About your emotions |
|
|||||
How did it
influence my thoughts? |
“I have been really lethargic today and
just really sluggish. It’s the last day of a few days hard training, and I
know I should have toughed it out before the rest day”. |
|||||
How did it
influence my thoughts and actions? |
“Initially felt rubbish and wanted to stop;
now feel guilty because I did not train hard enough; have to stop myself from
training tomorrow because my head knows I should rest, but I am driven to go
faster and can’t get the fact out of my head that missing training will cost
places” |
|||||
As seen in
Figure 1, I would also record thoughts and feelings on how training went and
what specific factors you feel influenced your mood. As indicated previously,
expressive writing (7) has been found to be an
effective intervention strategy. By exploring the likely cause of unwanted
emotions, you also begin to develop a blueprint that helps you recognise situations which bring these and therefore
provide opportunities through which to choose a different path to act in the
future. For example, if speaking to competitors on the start line gets you
particularly nervous, or their banter evokes anger which in turn affects your
race strategy, then recognising this to be the case
might help change your decision on where to warm-up. You could warm-up alone or
rather than warming up near your competitors, and if situational factors
prevent this, then listening to music via headphone can serve to block out
their conversations.
Experimenting and revising
An important
aspect of any intervention is to estimate the size of the potential benefit. It
is important to recognise, or have identified how
this benefit will be realised before starting the
intervention. If for example, you choose to use imagery prior to competition,
then it helps to identify what you wish to gain from using it. Many athletes
will reply that the purpose of using intervention is to improve performance,
and therefore the athlete should reflect on the relationship between imagery
use and individual performance. However, improved performance as a criterion
for judging the success of an intervention is little open and potentially
vague. It helps to ask further questions on how it will help performance, and
specifically, where should benefits be identified. An example of how this
process works can be seen in Figure 2.
Figure 2
Following an
intervention to improve performance:
Intervention |
What was the goal |
Did it work Yes or No |
Comments /reflection |
Week 1:
Use imagery before starting to improve performance |
Run faster
over 5km |
No. I ran
the same time but slowed at the end. |
Data shows
I slowed down badly; or I went off too fast at the start. I felt great at the
start- really focussed, maybe I need to revise my imagery to consider my pacing
strategy. Imagery seemed to help me run faster at the start, but I could not
sustain this. |
Week 2: Revise
imagery to focus on pacing and running smoothly. |
Run faster
over 5km but paying attention to pacing |
Yes,
partly worked. |
Data shows
I still slowed down, but my overall speed was faster. I did not slow down so
much at the end. The issue here is to develop something to prevent slowing
down at the end. |
Week 3:
Revise imagery to continue to focus on running smoothly, but now add using
imagery at the point when fatigue begins to build to image an object
associated with smooth running technique – in this case, a rotating train
wheel. |
Run faster
over 5km but paying attention to pacing; and using
imagery at the point when pain begins to build. |
Yes |
Smooth
start; imagery and its effect now understood. Imagery
helped cope with intense pain and managed to hold off slowing down until the
later stages, and then managed a final effort for last 200m. |
Summary
Self-help
interventions can be as effective as consultant led ones; however, self-help
interventions require the athlete to develop sophisticated methods of
monitoring but in terms of judging what to record and also
whether the intervention was successful. Training diaries should be used in conjunction with recording objective data
in terms of distance and time spent training. Expressive writing is not only a
helpful way of identifying issues stemming from training but also acts an
intervention in itself. Reflect on what was done, whether it worked or not
should be recorded, and this is information can be
used to guide revisions to intervention strategies in future.
Andy
Lane
Sport
psychology professor, University of Wolverhampton, UK
References
1.
Inside
sport psychology, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2010
2.
Clinical Psychological Review 2006; 13, 169-186
3.
Elements of Quality Online Education, Practice and Direction, Needham, MA: Sloan Center for
Online Education, 13-45, 2003
4.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 2011; 79:
123-128
5.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2008; 34:
381-393
6.
Journal of Sports Science and Medicine 2011; 10:
400-407. www.jssm.org/vol10/n2/22/v10n2-22pdf.pdf
7.
Psychological
Science 1997; 8: 162-166
8. The Sport and Exercise Scientist 2011; 29:
14-15. www.bases.org.uk/BASES-Expert-Statements