The Total Athlete
Webster’s dictionary defines an athlete of sports as: Any one trained to contend in exercises requiring great physical agility and strength; one who has great activity and strength; a champion. Already, the stereotype for an athlete is set. As an athlete, you must be of great physical agility and strength in order to be competitive and also be very active. The chief goal of being an athlete is to be the champion of whatever exercise the athlete is involved in. This is quite a lofty definition and puts great pressure on the athlete. If the athlete is a student pursuing an education of any kind, the pressure is increased all the more. In America today, we live in a society that expects the athlete to have tremendous ability, dedication, and drive. There is also the pressure to win in our competition-driven society. As a student, the athlete must manage all of this and still maintain good grades. How is the athlete supposed to ever be an athlete, by definition, and still meet all the criteria?
Most sports psychologists today recognize three very important areas of life that must be conquered in order to perform at one’s best. These areas are the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of a person. I’d like to add one more dimension that needs to be recognized in order to develop totally as an athlete. As archeologists dig though the centuries, they have never unearthed an atheistic culture. Every culture on this planet has at its core some type of faith in a higher power. Although the object of these faiths differ, there must be some validity to the subject of a higher power since it so unanimously dominates all cultures on Earth. With faith in the Hebrew God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob consistent between the largest religions in the world, Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, and Christianity, I want to consider developing your faith as an athlete, particularly in this God. Although sports psychologists recognize the need to develop the athlete in the first three areas, most coaches only realize the need to develop the athlete physically. The mentality seems to be that if the athlete can perform physically, then he will succeed. I had the privilege of coaching a javelin thrower a few years ago who came to me with a strong body, but not much talent for throwing the javelin. After working with him and developing and perfecting the basics and some advanced techniques of javelin throwing, he became the best thrower in his league. After winning his regional meet, he went to the state competition seeded in first place. Obviously, the pressure on him to succeed was great. He ended up in sixth place at the end of the meet. What happened? I had trained him physically to be the best and had started to train him spiritually, but I had totally neglected to train him emotionally and mentally to be the best. Although he had the talent and skills to be the best, he wasn’t mentally or emotionally strong enough to handle the pressure of the situation.
So, what does it take to succeed as an athlete and become the champion? Physically, the athlete must obviously either have natural talent or have perfected certain skills in order to excel. Mentally, he must know what is required of him, make the necessary sacrifices to obtain his goal, and commit himself to the task. Emotionally, he must control his emotions so he may focus on the present task at hand. He must allow himself to feel what it is like to experience both success and failure, and he must exercise self-control when results don’t turn out as expected. Spiritually, he must have an identity other than being an athlete. An athlete must realize that his talents and skills will not be available to him for his whole life and that they could even disappear in a matter of moments due to injury. Something lasting is needed for when he can no longer use his athletic abilities.
Having coached high school track for several years and competed as an athlete most of my life, I’m very aware of what an athlete must physically endure. The emotional and mental drive to succeed pushes an athlete to carry his body past its physical limits in both practice and competition. Strength training through weight lifting and aerobic exercise, diet, and adequate rest are fundamental aspects to developing your body physically. Spending hours in the gym yet neglecting to eat properly negates the benefit of the hours spent breaking down your muscles. Your body needs a diet rich in nutrients to restore the damaged muscle tissue. One long jumper that I coached was a phenomenal athlete. Having previously competed for many years in gymnastics, she had a great work ethic and dedication to her jumping. However, she worried about her figure also, and refrained from eating an adequate amount of food. As a result, she was always injured. She consistently performed in the top 3% of her league, but she had to do it injured. Because her body was lacking the necessary nutrients, it could not heal itself from the abuse of training and competing, even though the abuse her body received wasn’t much more than what any other athlete on the team received. She never competed to her full potential as an athlete because she never competed completely healthy. In all my years of being an athlete and coach, I’ve never seen a pair of legs disappear under as much tape, ice, and Ace wraps as hers did. Adequate rest should complement any workout as well. Athletes who don’t give their bodies time to recover from their workouts and competitions are creating difficulties down the road for them. The body will push itself over it’s limits if the athlete is strong enough to take the pain, but the body doesn’t heal as fast as the mind. Once the pain subsides, athletes may begin again to push their bodies to the limits physically even though the body hasn’t recovered from the initial stress. Overuse injuries are very common among athletes today. So, to stay strong physically, the athlete must develop a training program that incorporates all three factors: strength training and aerobic exercise, diet, and adequate time for rest.
Ability alone is not enough to be a champion. Coach Landry of the Dallas Cowboys once said about safety Bill Bates, “Bill has a lower ability, but he possesses great desire, motivation, and concentration. He gives 150%. He gives a total performance.” Most javelin throwers start out with the mentality that the sport is 10% mental and 90% physical. I prove that wrong to myself over and over. I weighed in at 150 pounds my junior and senior year in high school. I was by far the smallest thrower on our team and also in the league. Yet, my marks consistently landed in the top 5-10% of the league. Javelin throwing, along with most sports, requires a shift in focus for many athletes. Physical ability is not everything needed. A more accurate ratio would be 90% mental and 10% physical. In his book “In Pursuit of Excellence”, Terry Orlick defines seven areas to developing a mentally competitive athlete. These areas are: commitment, focused connection, confidence, positive images, mental readiness, distraction control, and ongoing learning.
Commitment is the first essential ingredient guiding the pursuit of excellence. With commitment, you can do almost anything; without it, high-level goals are virtually impossible to obtain. In a very real sense, focus is everything - in life and in performance pursuits. A positive and absorbing focus channels your commitment into a series of positive actions, thereby making your personal journey to excellence possible. Confidence comes from committing yourself to do the preparation or quality work, talking to yourself in positive ways about what you have done and what you can do, drawing lessons from your experiences and acting on them, and remaining positive with yourself through the many challenges and struggles along the way. The overall benefit of thinking, planning, and guiding your imagination in positive ways is to set a positive frame of mind for living and performing with quality. It allows you to create the conditions for success without having actually executed that performance in the real world. Excellence emerges when you are mentally ready to act in positive ways. This begins with a commitment to be mentally ready to make the most of each experience and each opportunity. Distraction control becomes the most important mental skill affecting the quality and consistency of your performance once you have learned to connect fully within your performance or experience, even for moderate periods of time. Personal excellence results from living the lessons from your experiences. You can extract these important lessons by evaluating your overall performance, critical parts of your performance, and the role that your mental state played in your performance. (Orlick, “In Pursuit of Excellence”)
This summary of Terry Orlick’s seven points encompasses well what it means to be a mentally strong athlete.
The emotional aspect of an athlete is what drives him to compete. Most successful athletes have a dream goal in mind. One would be hard pressed to find a professional or Olympic caliber athlete who did not have a dream goal and truly love what they were doing throughout their development in their sport. The drive to compete comes from deep within the athlete and inspires him to push through any barriers that come against him fulfilling his dream. Terry Orlick tells the story of one of the NHL’s most celebrated players, Bobby Clarke. Bobby Clarke was the former team captain and general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers Hockey club. In a discussion about the drafting of Clarke it was said:
We drafted Bobby Clarke on our second round, but there was a boy we drafted on our first round who was bigger and stronger, could skate and shoot better than Clarke, but Clarke made it and he didn’t. He never had the heart for the game. He wasn’t willing to sacrifice that little bit extra that you need to be a professional hockey player. In practice, Clarke would be there 10 minutes longer and he would work harder. In a game, he got himself mentally prepared to give the extra…the other player didn’t do that. Result - one went ahead, the other fell behind. Clarke did extra work on the ice, where he had to give a little more to check the man, where he had to bear down. Where it showed more than any place is coming back….Gotta give a little more. If you lose possession of the puck, now you have to dig down to your bootstraps for extra adrenaline to come back and check the man. Bobby Clarke would always show that. The other boy would put his head down and sort of give up. That’s the difference between the two. (Orlick, “In Pursuit of Excellence”)
The ability of athletes like Bobby Clarke to succeed when bigger, stronger, more talented athletes stand in their way is a stark demonstration of the power of the emotional aspect of the human person. There are countless stories like Bobby Clarke’s that tell of athletes overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to fulfill their dream. Names like Karen Lee Gartner, Steve Prefontaine, and Eric Liddell come to mind when I think of athletes who have displayed this behavior.
Every serious athlete focuses his energy toward reaching his goals. The physical, mental, and emotional dimensions are all significant in developing as a total athlete, but are you really complete? Can you dedicate yourself totally as an athlete and still neglect the obvious spiritual dimension? Most people do not recognize the spiritual dimension only because they have never been trained in it. People spend years and countless dollars on motivating themselves to achieve their goals. They have trained their bodies, minds, and emotions to react in a desired fashion, but they are still greenhorns in developing themselves spiritually.
The motivation of an athlete to invest 30 years of his life into becoming the best at his skill, to reach his peak, to conquer the best opponents is based upon an internal drive. He knows he is an athlete; that is his identity. When people look at him, they seen an athlete. That is where his skills, his passions, his pleasures are all derived. He is proud to claim that he is an athlete. His life is centered around becoming a better athlete. To master his skill, to become the champion, to defy all the odds, that is what life is all about. Right? What happens when the athlete gets in a car accident and becomes paralyzed? What happens when an ACL tears and you cannot jump, run, or cut anymore? What happens when the athlete can no longer be an athlete? All of his dreams, his goals come crashing down. What in the world do you do next? How can the athlete possibly come back from such a fall? Some people then dedicate their lives to being the perfect parent. “I’ll invest my life in my children,” they say. Sounds noble and it is. But what happens when your children move out, or God forbid, they die? All the new dreams and goals come crashing down again. So what is the next pursuit going to be? A hobby? Another profession? A person? Mastering some other skill? People pursue and pursue and pursue, but they rarely find what they are looking for. They risk all to invest their lives in something that could come crashing down at any moment. But to invest in God, this is the benefit of developing the spiritual dimension. Scott Fletcher, second baseman for the Boston Red Sox said, “People think if you’re a Christian, you’re wimpy and you don’t care. Well, if you know God, you know that’s wrong. That’s way wrong. God is a winner. God never loses. That’s why he’s God.” God cannot perish. He cannot lie, cheat, or steal. If one invests in God, his investment is secure because there is no risk of anything happening to God. The same God that our ancestors believed in is the same God who wants to be involved in our lives today. Having confidence that you’re secure in anything other than God is risky business. Paul tells us in Philippians 3:3-8:
“For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh – though I myself have reasons for such confidence. If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ.”
What he is saying here is, “I am the best at what I do. I have reason to brag because of who I am. There is no one better than me. Just look at the facts, check out my stats. But now that I have developed the spiritual dimension of my life, I see that none of that is lasting. I could lose it in a moment. Now I consider all of that a loss compared to the security I find in the greatness of knowing Jesus as my Lord and God. For Him, I have given up finding my identity in those other things. I now find my identity in Him, who is lasting.”
For an athlete, finding his identity in Jesus means he no longer has to worry about losing his identity if he cannot perform. Since Jesus is God, this means your investment in Him is secure. This can help create unity in team sports because the athlete is playing for God and not for himself. Part of developing the spiritual dimension is recognizing where your abilities have come from. Knowing there is a God and recognizing that your abilities came from Him can motivate you to perform at the absolute best of your abilities. Try and relate to what Wendel Deyo has to say about Anthony Munoz.
Tomorrow was Opening Day. The beginning of a new season in the NFL. The opponent was the Seattle Seahawks and yet the topic of the evening was something quite different. As more than a dozen of the Cincinnati Bengals filed out of the hotel room of Anthony Munoz and Max Montoya, Anthony asked me to stay. The struggle of the night was far greater than any concerns he had for the next day. His future was involved. “I don’t know why I’m playing” was the simple statement. “I enjoy the game. I’ve never played for money or recognition. I’m not motivated by personal awards. I just don’t know why I’m playing.” It was simple and clear. My mind raced. I quickly thought of the past season. Anthony had been selected the number one draft pick of the Cincinnati Bengals and the number three pick in the entire NFL. His rookie season had been a profound success. He had made the All Rookie Team and Honorable Mention All Pro, among other awards. He had all the benefits of success and yet now the statement, “I don’t know why I’m playing.”
As Anthony and I sat down on his hotel bed, we began to discuss what God’s Word had to say. As we discovered God’s truth together, it launched a new source of motivation that propelled the career of the greatest offensive lineman in the history of the National Football League – a career that will surely lead to the NFL Hall of Fame. Anthony became the first player in any position ever selected to 11 consecutive Pro Bowls. He received numerous Offensive Lineman of the Year Awards, received the coveted NFL Man of the Year Award, was a unanimous selection to the Team of the Decade, and had his career crowned with being selected as one of the top players in the historic first 75 years of the NFL. The secret to Anthony’s success lies not only in his natural athletic ability and his incredible work ethic but also, and perhaps even more importantly, in the significance of his motivation. (Athletes In Action, The Principles of Athletic Competition)
What was it that impacted Anthony so deeply? Only this realization:
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – His good, pleasing and perfect will.” -Romans 12:1-2 (emphasis added)
Anthony realized that he could still perform to the best of his abilities and by doing so, incorporate the spiritual dimension of life into his playing. He learned the value of being motivated intrinsically and not extrinsically. Motivated by his love for Jesus, he thanked God for His love through his competition in football.
“For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” -1 Timothy 4:8. The spiritual dimension has its fingers in all the other aspects of being an athlete. The athlete has something to fall back on that is lasting in case something happens where he cannot perform physically anymore. It gives the athlete an identity that is so much more lasting and meaningful than just being an athlete. And yet while he finds his identity in God he can still be recognized as an athlete. And when he is having the worst day of his life at a competition, the motivation to keep going and stay positive remains. As he competes, his motivation to perform well is that by so doing, he is displaying the power of God in his life.
In conclusion, listen to a quote by Curt Warner after his rookie year. “There was a lot of pressure for me to perform, and I felt that. But (Jesus) is in control of all things. I just gave it all over to Him. He gave me strength and courage. At times I didn’t know how good I would do, but I played consistently through the year. I thank (Jesus) for that.” Curt Warner became Rookie of the Year and helped the Seattle Seahawks make it to the playoffs for their first time. They ended up just one win short of going to the Superbowl. Curt Warner was strong in all four areas of athletic discipline; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Curt Warner and Anthony Munoz are great examples of Total Athletes.