The Sports Doc Chalk Talk

If you are a youth sports coach, it’s likely you have never been formally trained and prepared to respond to many of the current issues regularly seen in sports. Some of these newer concerns include youth sports burnout, kids using performance supplements, sport specialization, and year-round training, to name a few. In addition to these newer problems, “traditional” issues including dealing with playing time concerns, player cuts, and learning how to motivate kids will always be challenges for coaches, regardless of level of coaching.Unfortunately, most youth and interscholastic coaches are not afforded professional training and development so that they may excel in their role as a coach. As a result, the youth coaching experience can end up being very different than what was originally hoped for, mainly as a result of upset parents, team problems, and even off-field issues and concerns related to a lack of sports leadership.Peak Performance for Youth Sport Coaches is a professional program designed to help coaches prepare and respond to many of the issues just mentioned, and provides coaches with the needed tools so that they can create a positive, healthy, and winning sports culture on their team.If you are a coach this program is a must-have, and if you know a coach this program will make a great gift for him or her!www.drstankovich.com

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has been released examining the success rates of various diets and subsequent weight loss and permanent habit change. Interestingly, while the four diets used for the study varied amongst one another, all subjects (regardless of type of diet) experienced significant weight loss. It was noted that all subjects who participated in the study also followed an exercise program, which also likely contributed to the weight loss.How people lose weight varies dramatically, hence the reason for undertaking a study that looks at what specific diet works the best (and with the fewest problems and side effects). Most experts will agree that one simple rule to follow when losing weight is to a) eat less food, and b) exercise more. Since all the subjects who participated in this study did just that, it should be no surprise that they also experienced a healthy amount of weight loss over the course of the 2-year study.The interesting, and potentially overlooked variable in this study, however, may be the individual counseling each subject received while participating in the weight loss program. It was reported that all subjects received individual counseling every 8 weeks throughout the 2-year study, prompting the question of how important is individual counseling as it applies to healthy, long-term weight loss?  Learning how to cope with the stress of weight loss is ultimately what leads to habit change and weight loss success.People who have tried to lose weight, be it through low-fat, no-fat, low calorie, or any other approach to modified eating, almost always hit mental roadblocks and walls in their pursuit of reaching their weight-loss goal. In these moments, people without accountability or support leave themselves very at-risk for easy cheating (and sabotaging their weight loss program). If nothing else, professional counseling can provide solutions to those concerns.It seems to me, and the NEJOM study backs this up, that just about any approach to dieting will work, but that individual/group counseling may be the most important variable in the equation.While this variable was barely mentioned in the news story, it may actually be the most important piece to successful weight loss. When examining any type of behavior modification (i.e. weight loss), goal setting, goal attainment measurement, stress and anxiety relief, and general support and encouragement are all incredibly important components that help people successfully reach their end-goal state. Professional counseling offers all of this, and the integration of regular counseling could just be the “missing link” of you are someone who has done the weight loss-gain yo-yo over the years.Check out “Changing Habits for Life Success” audio program for more help with losing weight!www.drstankovich.com

Check out my latest column on parents and the potential damage that can happen when they let things get out of control during summer sports.  Parents need to prepare ahead of time for issues like playing time, player cuts, and making the transition to varsity sports in order to ensure a positive and successful youth sport experience.While most parents “get it” and do it right, we still have some that allow their emotions to get the best of them at youth sporting events. Additionally, summer travel leagues can contribute to increased chances for youth sports burnout, so it is important to keep an eye on symptoms like low motivation and lack of excitement (Sports Success 360).Make this summer the best one yet — youth sport success depends on parents and coaches working in tandem to ensure kids are safe and having fun while competing.  Whether you are involved in pop warner, AAU, little league, or pee wee sports, the success your child experiences in sports depends on your sport role modeling and sports leadership commitment.Also, be sure to check out our always expanding product line designed to immediately help with holistic training and development:www.drstankovich.com

The two newest Sports Performance Assessments launched over the weekend (baseball and softball), adding to our growing line of sport performance apps on itunes! As with all SPA performance improvement products, the baseball and softball versions offer sport-specific questions and feedback, allowing users to develop a mental toughness improvement plan and take what they have learned to the diamond.Each SPA is only $1.99 and can literally be used over the players entire career. With summer ball just around the corner, now is the time to prepare to make this season the best one yet!Refine your focus, improve self-confidence, and learn how to better handle stress and adversity on the field by using the SPA-Baseball and SPA-Softball apps!www.drstankovich.com

I was recently asked in an interview what I thought through my work in sports therapy was the greatest “mental skill” an athlete could possess? After pausing for a moment, I answered the question, but rather than minimizing my comment to what was the most important mental skill for athletes, I expanded my opinion to what I thought was the most important mental skill for people.The answer to the question, regardless if we are talking about athletes or everyday people, is the ability to develop a strong human resiliency toward stress, adversity, and failure. In other words, the ability to inoculate oneself from adversity in life, and to develop appropriate, effective means for warding off stress is, to me, the most important “mental toughness skill” a person can learn and master (The Life Series).I remember many years ago reading M. Scott Peck’s famously popular book “The Road Less Traveled,” and being especially taken by the first sentence in the book: Life is difficult. In the years since reading TRLT, I have found this insight to be especially applicable when working with people experiencing distress in their life — in other words, the problems they deal with are very “normal” when you place them within the context of how challenging and “difficult” life can be for all of us. Rather than looking at problems as unique and as an indicator of how unsuccessful a person is, I try to remind people that life is difficult — and that we all experience the same kinds of problems in life. And while we all have unique situations and circumstances we deal with, it really doesn’t matter how we experience stress, frustration, adversity, and failure (i.e. through a bad game, a relationship breakup, or a school/work failing), we all feel the pain of “coming up short” in life on any given day.The real concern I have, then, is how people respond to their unique stress and adversity. In sports I see this everyday — a youngster will look great in practice conditions, but then comes the game and he “chokes,” or freezes up, resulting in poor athletic outcomes. Of course, it is very normal to have bad days and occasionally “choke,” but what I am most interested in is how he responds to the situation? Does he pout and feel sorry for himself, or does he pick himself up, dust off, and become even more excited by the challenge of making tomorrow a better day?The same question is true for people who are not athletes — when adversity happens in life, is the first response to roll up the sleeves and work hard for a better tomorrow, or does the person take more of a “victim mentality,” helpless to the situation, and with little effort toward taking the responsible steps to remedy the problem?From my vantage point, it is very concerning that we are moving away from understanding and emphasizing the importance of human resiliency, and instead spending more time each year looking for organic reasons why people do things, or new pills to help them literally forget about and/or numb them from their pain. I recently saw a commercial about a an anti-depressant pill that is supposed to be used in addition to the anti-depressant pill the person is already taking —– so rather than learn cognitive/behavioral human performance improvement skills to strengthen resiliency, the message comes across as there being some medical advance through prescription medicine that will seemingly make it all just go away……..does this seem a little odd to you? Think about that — take a pill on top of another pill — just the basic paradigm seems bizarre and extreme to me (not to mention all the side effects that are mentioned throughout the ad!!).Human resiliency, to me, is a “mental skill” that can absolutely be developed and strengthened!! Of course, there are always people with unique circumstances and who may be better candidates for more advanced medicinal approaches, but for the average person (which most of us qualify to be) working hard to develop “bounce back” strategies and skills is truly where it’s at for life success to occur. Is it tough to become resilient? Of course it is — Dr. Peck told us that with his “Life is difficult” opening to TRLT!! But just because something is tough to do doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it – resiliency leads to greater self-awareness, confidence, open-mindedness, and motivation — precisely the things needed to reach our full potential, and to do so safely and without fear of side-, withdrawal-, or interaction-effects from unproven medications (some that even require a “boost” from a second medication!).Please know that I am not an anti-pharmaceutical drug person, nor am I saying that people should ignore the advances of modern medicine (no Tom Cruise here). I am concerned, however, that our knee-jerk response when dealing with problems today is becoming more and more directed at what medicines are out there to “fix” our pain, rather than going back to a simpler, and arguably more effective approach – that is, to understand pain and adversity are parts of life, and that we can (with a little effort) really overcome some pretty unbelievable things in life by exercising some patience, developing solid game plans for future success, and leaning on our support team of loved family and friends who are there to help us.So that’s my long-winded answer to the greatest mental skill to develop: Resiliency!!

The Sports Performance Assessment (SPA) is a really fun and exciting way to test your mental toughness – but the best part about the SPA is that it’s also your own powerful personal feedback and teaching system.Taking the test is easy to do and can be completed in just a couple of minutes. The best way to use the SPA is to answer each honestly without thinking too deeply into each question – instead, try to go with your immediate responses, as this will best reflect your true mental toughness level.Upon completing the SPA your scores are provided in colorful graphs and scoring icons, along with your unique personal feedback and performance instruction notes. Read the feedback carefully and begin to implement the tailored training system into your athletic regime for best future results. The training skills you will receive are based on scientifically-proven sport psychology performance enhancement skills delivered in easy-to-follow language. As a bonus, the SPA offers another great feature – you can email your results to your PC, allowing you to keep a personal folder and print your own personal performance manual to take with you to the field!Take SPA several times during each season, spacing your tests roughly 2-3 weeks apart. The SPA’s robust trend data feature keeps all your scores for you, making it easy to quickly compare various test points through out the season and actually “see” your improvement.Personal, instructive, game changing – The Sports Performance Assessment!www.drstankovich.com

I must applaud Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban for his recent comments about fully integrating a sport psychologist within his team. In fact, I just wrote a blog last week about the dire need in professional sports to bring on these services in light of today’s athletes and their growing list of off-field problems. Cuban gets it as a sport leader — he obviously sees that his players are his number one asset, and helping today’s young athletes on and off the field makes a lot of sense when you think of the tens of millions of dollars invested in them. Unfortunately, pro sports do not have enough Mark Cuban type forward-thinking owners — owners not afraid to break the “old school” sports mentality that coaches can handle and fix players problems – or that teams can quickly address problems reactively after they occur!Admittedly, Mark Cuban is a polarizing figure in sports — he can be vocal and often displays a lot of emotion from the stands (and if you are not a Mavs fan I could see how this can be annoying to you). Still, when I read his comments about integrating Dr. Kalkstein with the team, I felt like he took the words right out of my mouth (actually, he may have, check my blog article from last week and you will see how similar we think on this issue).Below is an excerpt of Cuban’s comments — see for yourself how brilliant his views are on comprehensive care and coverage for his players – its mighty impressive:…To balance as well as deepen the layers of advice he receives, Cuban has rehired sports psychologist Don Kalkstein to work full time with the Mavs. Cuban said he dismissed Kalkstein in 2007 at the request of Johnson before rehiring the psychologist last season.“Avery didn’t like him around,” Cuban said. “Avery wanted it to be his team. It was my decision to think, Well, Avery took us to the [2007 NBA] Finals and won 67 games, he’s earned that right. It turned out if we would have kept him, [Johnson] might still be here.”Why is a psychologist so important to the team?”When you have 20-something-year-old kids, they’re going to have fun, right?” Cuban said. “I don’t have any problem with that as long as it doesn’t bother your job. And so the minute it impacts your ability to do your job, I have a problem with that.”Cuban counts on Kalkstein to provide information on team chemistry — but to do so without betraying confidences.”He won’t give me the particulars on individuals, but he gives me the sense of the team,” Cuban said. “He won’t violate privacy, but I’ll ask how one guy fits in the team situation vs. another guy, how one guy can communicate with the coaches vs. another guy, will this guy be able to evolve and communicate with the coaches? We’ve got to be able to put everybody in a position to succeed, and the only way to do that is to be able to communicate with him or find somebody who will.”Chemistry is critical. Sometimes there are little nuances of things that negatively impact the chemistry that over the course of the long season you’ve got to be able to nip in the bud. And if you don’t — you see it with teams all the time, and most teams just hope they work themselves through and put it on the coach or the GM [to fix the issues]. But just because you coach basketball or you evaluate basketball talent, that doesn’t mean you’re great at sports psychology or understanding the chemistry of a team. And just because it worked in the ’80s doesn’t mean it’s going to work in the ’90s or the 2000s or the 2010s.”You’ve got to be able to cut bait and know when you’ve got problems and know when you can solve those problems internally and when you can’t, and know what you’re going to do about them. There are guys we traded just because of addition through subtraction.”So Kalkstein helps? “He always does, yes,” Cuban said. “And you put that together with your own personal experiences and what you see. He travels with us, he’s out there with the guys shagging balls, and he’s behind the bench with the coaches.”It’s not like the players have formal sessions with Kalkstein. “No, he just talks to them — let’s go out and shoot, and he’ll shag balls for them and just talk to them. And again, I won’t ask him what he tells them or what he asks them, because I want them to know that it’s private and that he doesn’t share that with me at all. But he helps to qualify our roster — here are the guys who are going to be able to communicate, and here’s where the communication problems are going to come. … You’ve got to know everything.”He’s the reason why we drafted Devin Harris [with the No. 5 pick in 2004], because when he interviewed Devin over some of the other players he said, ‘This guy has heart, he has this-this-this-this’ — and he was right.”According to Cuban, Kalkstein urged the Mavericks to not draft another highly rated player in 2004 and vowed to quit if they overruled him to pick the player anyway. “He said, ‘If you don’t have any use for me, you’re not going to listen to me.’ “

The Sport Performance Assessment (SPA) is a great sports performance teaching tool for parents, teachers, coaches, and anyone else who helps kids participating in youth and interscholastic sports.  Now for the first time ever, you can have your own “on-call sport psychologist” to help with athletic performance enhancement!The SPA is a short test designed to assess an athletes mental toughness, as measured by confidence, focus, mental preparation, arousal control, and ability to handle adversity. It is designed for athletes 12 years and up, with parental involvement and guidance strongly suggested in order to maximize the value of SPA testing, results, and feedback.To get started, simply begin the assessment and fill in the open fields (name, school, sport) — next, complete the assessment by answering honestly, as there are no right or wrong answers. It is imperative that athletes answer truthfully in order to receive the appropriate skill building feedback that is automatically generated based on the users scores.After completing the SPA, scores are immediately generated that include graphs for easy-to-view score representations and comparisons. After examining the scores (colorful icons are provided for easy analysis), a professional feedback report is made available that includes specific insights about what each score means, and suggestions for improving the areas of concern. This report can also be emailed to the user, allowing for hard drive storage and printing options.As a mentor to an athlete who has completed the SPA, be sure to read over the report and work with the child to develop ways to integrate some of the ideas provided in the SPA report. While the SPA is not intended to be a substitute for individual counseling and does have limitations with respect to the quantity and depth of feedback provided, it does serve as a very useful, convenient, and effective tool to use begin learning about how to develop sport psychology mental training skills to use to enhance athletic abilities.www.drstankovich.com