This is Part 2 of my interview with Dr. Haley Perlus, sports psychologist and mental training expert, on the mental tools you can use to motivate your students (and yourself) to go beyond self-imposed limitations and the lines of “suffering” that we dare not cross or have a very hard time crossing.
Dr. Perlus differentiates between non-functional and functional pain or suffering. There is no hiding the fact that cycling, and fitness in general (that is, if your goal is truly to excel and become very fit), have their moments of real difficulty and even “suffering.” Once you determine that the suffering is functional (i.e., non-injurious or non-threatening), such as you might experience in high-intensity intervals, a long challenging climb, a threshold field test, or a time trial, then it’s time to learn to push beyond it.
In Part 1, Dr. Perlus provided two of the five tips to overcome the mental side of overcoming challenge.
Part 2 gives you the rest of the tools you need to help inspire your students—and yourself—to master the mental game.
Hi, I’m not sure if this is still an active comment box even though it is a recording from long ago…
But firstly, that was brilliant. Thank you! I just started introducing my class to these types of drills and I feared they would get bored, but they actually loved it. My questions are:
– in an article about associating and disassociating, it discussed the effectiveness of disassociating up until the 75% effort level. Would you still apply that even though in the recording she did not differeniate?
– I was wondering if there was a pdf with a list of cues, that was mentioned in part 1? I just couldn’t find it.
Thank you!
I loved it and would love more mental- fitness oriented topics