Despite being only 20 herself, Kinsella was the most experienced member of the young GB team and had to not only shake off her disappointing qualifications performance from two days previous, but also lead and support her team through their first Olympic Final. Overcoming any feelings of doubt in herself, Kinsella had a stellar Team Final performance, improving all her qualification scores and leading Team GB to a Bronze Medal!

So, how did she do it? How do you overcome failure and replace it with success under such pressure? The key here is resilience.

Gymnastics is known for its graceful, powerful, and spectacular nature with young gymnasts performing impressive skills on a range of apparatus. Historically, the image of very young, slightly built gymnasts performing extraordinarily challenging skills springs to mind; inevitably that means top gymnasts have to be training with considerable intensity from a very young age.

Although gymnastics is slowly moving away from that idea and forming a more holistic approach along with a number of other sports, it is true that some sports do need to have a certain degree of specific training and skill acquisition before undergoing puberty to help them be successful. However, these sports are few and far between and certainly do not encompass as many sports as people believe.

This poses several challenges for coaches and parents; not least how to help them succeed without mental or physical harm.

Due to the nature of gymnastics, young athletes experience challenges they may perceive as stressful or as failure; a sub-optimal competition, suffering a skill block, or even managing injury can have profound psychological effects. As a coach and parent team, part of our job is to teach athletes early on how to bounce back from worrying events, how to cope when things go wrong and how to celebrate smaller positives in sport.

So, what is resilience, and how can we help our young athletes develop it so that they stay mentally healthy in their sport and develop the psychological strength to remain comfortable throughout the inevitable twists and turns of a competitive sporting experience? What develops resilience and how can we, as coaches and parents, support our young athletes in gaining this core life skill alongside their physical training?

Unravelling the Mysteries of Resilience.

Resilience is defined as “the role of mental processes and behaviour in promoting personal assets and protecting an individual from the potential negative effect of stressors.” In simpler terms, this means the personality traits an individual displays that prevents them becoming overwhelmed or discouraged by stressful events, for example a bad training session or the death of a family member.

Resilience falls into 2 broad types – robust and rebound resilience:

• Robust resilience refers to a protective quality that allows an athlete to maintain their performance and mental wellbeing under pressure.
• Rebound resilience refers to an athlete’s ability to bounce back and return to a normal state of cognitive functioning following short-term disruptions to training or mental health.

So, what does a resilient athlete look like?

We now know what resilience is, but what does it look like when in a day-to-day setting. Well, resilient athletes:

• Are better able to challenge negative thoughts and ideas, improving their belief in themselves and their ability.
• Are more likely to be able to focus on tasks without becoming distracted. This is particularly important during competitions!
• Will display characteristics of optimism and competitiveness, meaning when they have pre-competition butterflies, they will view it as a positive experience that will help them perform well.
• Will be proactive and take matters into their own hands. These athletes will be more likely to do extra conditioning or practise in their own time to improve performance.
• Are perfectionists (but not the “I’m not good enough type”)! They will set themselves high standards and expect that they meet these standards, but they won’t beat themselves up if things go slightly pear-shaped.

Resilience is key not only for training and competitions, but also for a young persons mental health. A happy athlete will want to learn, improve themselves and succeed. An unhappy athlete will be afraid to try in case they fail.

This sounds very important, but how can I help as a parent?

Although resilience is a personality trait, it is also process which individuals go through in response to their environment. This means that there are things that parents can do that influence internal processing and external environment to set young athletes up for success.

Influencing the Internal:

Encourage positive behaviour: help your child practice the behaviours above. Encourage them to be proactive and set themselves high standards. Try and set a good example by practicing the behaviours yourself, your children will copy you!

Reassure them when things go wrong: there isn’t a straight line to success, plans change and sometimes things go wrong. Turn the threat into a challenge, for example if they have a knee injury use it as an opportunity to develop their understanding/tactical awareness, rather than seeing it as lost time!

Be supportive: make sure your child feels like they have someone to turn to whenever they need advice or just a pep talk. Figure 1 shows the different types of support athletes of all ages may need throughout their career.

Changing the External.

Below are some things coaches and clubs can do to create a facilitative environment conducive to success:

We’re all in this together attitude: without trying to sound like the cast of high school musical, coaches need to encourage everyone to work together. This means coaches, parents AND athletes all working together to create, work towards and achieve goals.

Safe risk taking: Athletes should be free to take sensible risks in training and push themselves out of their comfort zones. Create a safe and supportive environment they can do this in, don’t get angry or punish them if things go wrong, it’s all part of learning.

Accountability and responsibility: encourage athletes to be responsible for their actions, don’t blame poor results on just luck (if you lose because of luck, then surely winning is luck too?). Help athletes be accountable for their actions in training, that way when they do get the result they want, they will know it was because of their hard work and dedication.

Develop coach-athlete relationships: your athletes are more than just small machines who come to training 3 or 4 times a week. They have hobbies, likes and dislikes so try and take the time to get to know them or ask them about their day. They are more likely to seek feedback and reassurance from you. They want to know you care about them, make sure you show it!

To round it all up.

To sum up, psychological resilience is a mechanism that allows athletes to overcome stressful events and quickly return to normal functioning. Resilience can help us appraise threatening situations and turn them into something challenging yet manageable.

Resilience is important, not just during sport but throughout life. Most people will encounter failure a lot more than success, so we need to give children the tools to manage this without compromising their mental health.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to improve psychological resilience, instead just some ideas to implement in your sport or home setting that will help your athlete work towards their goals and be the best they can be.

• Physically, with young growing bodies, playing the same sport with the same movements, the same muscles being used and the same stresses to tissues, is very challenging. Overuse injuries to the upper and lower extremities are a real problem. We’ve already noted that these injuries are a youth epidemic. Many feel that specialising just multiplies these problems.
• It is important to include off sport conditioning that helps to develop the overall athlete and strengthen against these repetitive motion injuries. Concentrate on what Bob Gajda, famous sports therapist called ” strengthening the opposites and stabilisers”. The muscles and tendons that worked against those repetitive motions. Athletic trainers, physical therapists and personal trainers can help devise these programs. This kind of training is also helpful for multiple sport athletes.
• Make sure that strengthening feet and ankles and working balance is included no matter what the sport! It is so important.

Tennis, figure skating, gymnastics, swimming, soccer and ballet are all examples of early specialisation sports. It’s common for me to see young figure skaters under the age of 10 already skating every day. They are just not interested in other sports.

Most sports medicine doctors, physical therapists, and athletic trainers agree that playing multiple sports is a safer route to take where injuries are concerned. Almost all also agree that specialisation is a greater risk especially for overuse and repetitive motion injuries. The challenge is it’s a very tough sell for these early specialisation sports.

Too many coaches and traveling teams and club sports really push this idea that not specialising will cause these young athletes to “fall behind” in the contest to produce the best for their sport. There is no evidence that this is true. There are many examples of great athletes in all sports who grew up playing other sports and then during their teens and later paid total attention to the one sport.

We’ve talked a lot about the overuse and repetitive motion injuries prevalent in youth sports and the even greater risks with early specialisation sports.

One of my favourite points is the importance of “Intelligent Rest”. The necessity of proper recovery- regardless of the sport or intensity. Young growing bodies need to properly recover from these physical demands, particularly with the early specialisation sports. Sports medicine and science has come a long way with new methods and tools helping with recovery but none of them can replace ‘Intelligent Rest.’  Some of the most successful young athletes I’ve seen over the years in the these sports would take off 3-4 weeks a couple times a year. Take off? That means a real break from the sport- no training or practice. Doing other things- being a child. Physical activities are fine- bike- swim- etc, but no specific sport related activity.

Sports parents must insist on these breaks- often the kids or coaches won’t!

Another danger is “the mental game” and the real concerns of mental burnout. Sports parents need to be aware that when these children don’t get breaks from their sports, they can really turn off. The late sports psychologist, Dr. Jim Vicory, who shared my radio show for a few years in the 1990s paid special attention to this. He would stress that “kids no matter how serious or talented needed to have fun. They were not small adults but young developing children who need to learn through experience and not be robots being consistently drilled”. The pressures, some from sports parents, coaches, and the kids themselves are very real and relentless- the competition alone can be really challenging!

The pressures, schedules, and physical demands on some of these children are extreme. If your young athlete needs pain medicine to participate or stay in the game, YOU’RE OVER THE LINE!

This article was written by Dr Robert Weil and adapted from his section in the book of #HeySportsParents.

This is the first study to assess the relevance of growing up wearing footwear vs. barefoot on jumping, balancing and sprinting motor performance during different stages of childhood and adolescence.

The study shows that habitually barefoot children are noticeably better at jumping and balancing compared to children who habitually wear shoes, particularly from 6-10 years of age.

While these beneficial barefoot effects diminished in older adolescents, the research nevertheless highlights the importance of barefoot exercise for motor development as children grow and mature.

“Walking barefoot is widely thought to be more natural, and the use of footwear has long been discussed as an influencing factor on foot health and movement pattern development,” explains Professor Astrid Zech from the University of Jena, Germany, who led the study.

“A few studies report that barefoot situations change biomechanics in children and adults during running and jumping — but only limited knowledge exists for the clinical relevance of this finding. We wanted to investigate, for the first time, whether changes in foot biomechanics due to barefoot activities are actually relevant for the development of basic motor skills during childhood and adolescence.”

Zech, together with two research teams, assessed three motor skills — balance, standing long jump and a 20-meter sprint — in 810 children and adolescents from 22 primary and secondary schools across rural Western Cape South Africa and urban areas of northern Germany. The two groups were selected to represent different footwear lifestyles: children from South Africa are habitually barefoot, while children from Germany wear shoes most of the time.

The habitually barefoot participants scored significantly higher in the balance and jumping tests. This difference was observed in both test conditions and across all age groups (6-10, 11-14 and 15-18 years), but particularly evident in 6- to 10-year-old children. The habitually barefoot children also performed better when barefoot than with shoes.

“Most of the primary school children in our study (South Africa) go to school and perform sport and leisure activities barefoot,” says Professor Ranel Venter from Stellenbosch University, who led the South African research team. “Our finding that these children performed better in balancing and jumping supports the hypothesis that the development of basic motor skills during childhood and adolescence at least partly depends on regular barefoot activities.”

The results for the sprint test, however, were different. Here the children who habitually wore shoes performed better, particularly those in the 11-14 year age group, and both groups performed better while wearing shoes.

Overall, the researchers’ work emphasises the benefits of barefoot physical activities for motor development.

“Physical education classes, exercise and sport programs, and recreational activities that aim to improve basic motor skills could benefit from including barefoot activities,” says Zech. “Parents could also encourage regular barefoot time at home.”

This article was taken from the National Alliance for Youth Sports website and the full and original article can be found here.

• Enrol your child in an organised and properly managed sports programme
• Determine that coaches are properly qualified to coach the sport as well as trained in first aid and CPR
• All equipment should be properly used and safety/protective gear worn at all times
• The correct warm up and cool down exercises should be incorporated into practice sessions and matches
• Conditioning exercises such as age appropriate muscle strengthening and flexibility should be part of each practice session
• Proper techniques should be reinforced during the playing season
• Regular breaks both during practice and during the season should be instituted
• Play safe and within the rules of the game at all times
• Avoid heat injury by providing plenty of water to drink before, during and after exercise
• Prevent your child playing if in pain or very tired
• Stop the activity if there is pain
• Seek and respect medical advice for all serious and traumatic injuries
• Educate yourself regarding the different medical disciplines such as physiotherapist, biokineticist, podiatrist, chiropractor, occupational therapist, sports physician that may be able to assist with your child’s care
• Communicate with your child regarding their injury
• Understand and be sensitive to their feelings regarding their injury
• Avoid early specialisation that may result in overuse injuries
• Don’t rush your child back to the sports field for the wrong reasons

Concussion is currently the most talked about medical injury in sport and it is fantastic to see that it is getting such excellent media coverage.  The greater the understanding of concussion from all that are involved in sport can only lead to protecting the young players of today.

The article below has been slightly adapted but the full original article and other information about concussion can be found at: www.theconcussionplace.com

What causes a concussion?