 How important is mental toughness in cycling and can it be improved? This is what we'll be discussing today by taking a look at the science. At the end of the video, I'll give you five strategies that you can use to improve your mental toughness and pain tolerance when riding. Welcome back to another video. I talk a lot about how to physiologically become a stronger rider on this channel with topics like what intervals are best, how to arrange training, and what diet will make you the fastest. But today we're going to switch gears and talk about how to become a stronger rider from a psychological perspective. Success in cycling and other endurance sports is very much dependent on how much pain you can put your body through. As this study on the Cognitive Strategies of Olympic Cyclists puts it in the opening line, in endurance sports there is one element that all athletes who wish to excel must confront, exertion pain. Pain needs to be experienced in training in order to make fitness gains, and pain needs to be experienced in racing in order to achieve an optimal result. If you're always comfortable when you're riding your bike, you aren't going to get too far. Is this about to be like some motivational video or something, or are you just going to read studies like you normally do? Because if so, then sitting through this video without falling asleep is about to be way more painful than anything I've ever done on the bike. Pain may also go beyond a burning in the legs and lungs. For example, in an ultra endurance event it may come in the form of bonking, cracking, hitting the wall, or a number of other violent sounding terms to describe feeling like absolute crap and wanting to quit. For all of these reasons, whether you're doing a short track race or trying to finish a century, mental toughness plays a huge role in success, and there's evidence to show that more successful athletes have a higher level of mental toughness than your average individual. The study on mental toughness in athletes found that athletes of county standard and above reported significantly higher mental toughness than club and university athletes. And this review found that research into the relationship between mental toughness and performance has consistently shown that better performances are associated with higher levels of mental toughness, and that elite athletes have higher mental toughness than lower level performers. The best endurance athletes in the world are not only extremely physically fit, but also exhibit above average mental strength. Now it is possible that years of intense training not only strengthens an athlete's body, but also numbs them to pain. This systematic review and meta-analysis on pain perception in athletes found that athletes possessed higher pain tolerance compared to normally active controls, and that regular physical activity is associated with specific alterations in pain perception. So training might quite literally help to ease the pain, although it is interesting to note that some individuals naturally have a higher mental toughness, and this has been associated with a higher pain tolerance and better physical endurance. So we know that there's differences between people when it comes to mental toughness, and that this trait seems to play a role in success in endurance sports. The question now is, can we do anything to improve our mental toughness? Unfortunately, not a lot of experimental research has been done addressing this, perhaps because it would be difficult to test. However, we do have research looking into what the best athletes in the world do to cope with pain, and perhaps that would be a good place to start. This study on the development of mental toughness interviewed elite performers. They identified three underlying mechanisms to maintain mental toughness. A desire and motivation to succeed that was insatiable and internalized, a support network that included sporting and non-sporting personnel, and effective use of basic and advanced psychological skills. This review on mental toughness in sport concludes that mental toughness appears to be multi-dimensional and most often associated with unshakable self-belief, the ability to rebound after failures, persistence or refusal to quit, coping effectively with adversity and pressure, and retaining concentration in the face of many potential distractions. These characteristics can be both inherited and learned. Some of us are lucky enough to have been born with these traits, but how do we go about learning to cope with pain? This study delved into the coping strategies that Olympic cyclists use. What they found was that themes emerged among what the athletes said, and some of these themes included the following. Pain varied depending upon the satisfaction the athlete received from the experience when all physiological variables were held constant. A great example of this is when you're going all out during a race. If the race is going well and you're at the front, the pain doesn't seem that bad. However, if you're getting dropped, the pain can seem unbearable. How satisfied you are with what's going on around you may affect how much pain you actually feel. Cognitive skills such as goal-setting, imagery and positive self-talk were routinely used. Keeping your goal in mind, repeating phrases in your head and encouraging yourself are all tactics used with this one. Pain was a positive experience and part of the sport and an individual's identity. This means that instead of trying to ignore the pain, they embrace it. This is a big one and one that I use all the time, but I'll get into that in a minute. Finally, this article on self-regulation during endurance performance highlights some of the cognitive strategies used by Bradley Wiggins during the hour record. Perhaps one of the most painful forms of cycling one can endure. One pre-planned cognitive strategy was to mentally chunk the 60-minute event into 12-minute blocks. Research suggests that this may help by allowing athletes to set short-term goals within longer duration endurance events. So with this research in mind, what are some actionable steps that you can take to improve your mental toughness and pain tolerance? I've broken down what was talked about in the research into five strategies that you can use. The first is goal setting. Having a goal is a huge motivator, and when things get difficult, that's when keeping your goal in mind becomes the most important. Ah, one day, man. One day I'll actually have the power-to-weight ratio that I claim to have on Swift. In training during intervals, repeating your goal to yourself can help push you through the workout and make you more likely to complete it. Same thing with long rides. Towards the latter end of the ride, when you're starting to get tired, remember why you're doing this and repeat it to yourself. Goals could be a certain race coming up or a personal best. When things start to hurt, imagine yourself achieving that goal, and that'll help to ease the pain. During a racer event, it can be easy to compromise on your goals when things start to hurt. I know that for myself, when I'm really hurting, I start lowering my standards of what would be a successful result. For example, if I'm trying to win a race and I'm in the front group and then somebody attacks and they've got me on my limit and I'm struggling just to hold their wheel, I start having thoughts like, eh, second place isn't that bad. Maybe I'll just go for second today. I try to erase these thoughts as soon as they enter my head and instead remind myself of what I came here to do. Now, of course, there is a point at which I'll get dropped and have to settle for a lower placing. This is where you have to be careful with this technique. Don't let this derail your race. I have a whole separate strategy to use when this happens that I'll talk about in a minute. The next strategy is social facilitation. It's well-established that being in the presence of others brings out our competitive nature and causes us to perform better than we would if we were alone. For example, this study on the influence of competition on performance during cycling tested subjects in a solo and head-to-head time trial against another rider to measure whether or not having a person to compete against would improve their performance. Even though participants believed they were competing against another person, it was actually just a computer-generated version of themselves riding at their own fastest time. Those sneaky researchers. And it turns out that power and time did improve when subjects thought they were competing against another person versus when they were riding alone. How can you use this to your advantage? During training, you may wanna include hard group rides as part of your plan. While it isn't a perfectly structured workout, you will be able to go harder than you would if you were by yourself. I'll even have days where I may start my training ride with intervals and then join a hard group ride afterwards. Doing any sort of quality intensity after you do intervals is usually close to impossible, but in the presence of others, I'm able to dig that much deeper. This is more of a technique to be used while training as you'll already be reaping the benefits of social facilitation when you're at a race or event. This doesn't mean that you should scrap intervals and just ride with a group all the time. There's a time for structure and a time for hard group riding. I usually include hard group rides as a tune-up in the month before an important race. The next strategy is chunking and it's the strategy I talked about Bradley Wiggins using during the hour record and it's actually a fairly common strategy for many endurance athletes to use. Thinking about all the work you have ahead of you can be very daunting. If instead you break that task into chunks, it can start to seem more manageable. Take the hour, for example. Wiggins broke the hour into five 12-minute chunks. He wasn't thinking, wow, this feels awful and I can't believe I have to hold this for an hour. He was thinking, just make it through this 12-minute chunk. This is equally effective for longer efforts like a Sentry, for example. Don't think about how you have 90 plus miles left to ride. Break it into 20-mile chunks. All you have to do is ride another 20 miles. How hard is that, right? Then when you've ridden 20 miles, play this trick on yourself again and again until you reach 100. Many races will do this for you by having laps. Just concentrate on having a good fast lap instead of thinking about how many laps you have to go. And of course in training, you can do this with your intervals. Don't think about how many intervals you have to do after this one. Just concentrate on making this interval high quality and deal with the other intervals when you get to them. Our next strategy is embracing pain. This is one of the strategies that seem to keep popping up in the study on Olympic cyclists. As cyclists, suffering is almost part of our identity and rather than trying to ignore it or think about something else, jump head first into it and try to make suffering the goal. This one was particularly helpful to me as a young racer. There was a time in my early cycling career where I would get very caught up in the result and if in the middle of the race I wasn't getting the result I wanted, my effort level would drop significantly. This is why I said keeping your goal in mind during a race is helpful up to a point until that goal becomes out of reach at which point you need to switch strategies. I started to shift my thinking when it came to racing. Instead of focusing on winning, my focus was on destroying myself. If I crossed the line completely drained and left everything out on the course, that was mission accomplished. I started thinking of pain as a good thing and not the enemy. Interestingly enough, not focusing on results actually made my results better. At the time, I was a cross country mountain bike racer and this strategy works great for races like this where for the most part it's a solo effort. Cyclocross, mountain bike, time trials, these are the kinds of events where you need to be able to just put your head down and suffer until you hit the line. That being said, if you try this in a road race, everybody will just draft off of you and then out sprint you at the finish. There are many forms of racing where doing the exact opposite, trying to save energy at every possible opportunity is advantageous. These include road races, gravel races or even long mountain bike races with sections of road and gravel. The strategy here is to conserve as much as possible until a critical point in the race, whether that be a breakaway or a sprint finish or getting dropped. And at that point, you empty the tank. The last strategy is developing a no quit attitude. This strategy is important for all forms of cycling but maybe especially useful for ultra endurance events. The thought of quitting will pop up many times over the course of a long day on the bike. You have to act as if that's not even an option. Remember that how you feel during a long event will often come in waves. There are gonna be times where you feel like death but they will pass. No matter how much pain you're in at any given moment nothing will be as painful as taking the DNF and if you can just make it to the finish that will erase any pain you may have felt that day. If however you take the DNF you'll have to dwell in that pain for weeks after. This goes for getting mechanicals too. Find a way to fix it and get yourself to the finish. At the very least, you'll have a much better story to tell. It may sound cliche but these are the moments that define you as a rider. Are you the kind of rider that quits when things get difficult or are you the kind of rider that will do anything to make it to the finish? Yeah, well, you know, I drank a beer last night and got up this morning and my whoops score was actually negative which isn't a good thing. And I didn't eat any carbs this morning because I'm trying keto and I bonked and felt absolutely terrible. And I got a flat tire and didn't carry a spare tube with me because I didn't wanna carry the extra 75 grams. So I called it a day. I mean, how am I supposed to complete a 15 mile charity fun ride under these conditions? Now I'm by no means saying that you should ride through injury, dehydration or that if your frame snaps 10 miles into a century that you should walk the remaining 90 miles. There are points at which you need to pull the plug. However, cramping, bonking, hitting the wall, getting flat tires are all part of the experience and not reasons to quit. Thanks for watching. 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