RU Sport Psych Podcast // William Low

[Music] Hello and welcome to our sports conversation podcast from the Department of Sports Science at Rakek University. I am Dada Rapsun and today I am going to chat with William Lowe, who is an expert on pressure training. In pressure training, coaches and sports psychologists, professionals, strategically increase pressure during training to improve athletes' ability to cope with pressure and competition. So we thought it would be interesting to learn from him about the potential benefits of pressure training and what should be considered when you are applying it in practice. William is an assistant professor at Harry on Watts University in Edinburgh. Originally from California, he attended Whitman College before doing his master's degree in sports psychology from Miami University in Ohio. William then completed his PhD at the University of Essex in England before becoming an assistant professor at Harry on Watts. William also appears as a guest lecturer in the master's program at Rakek University Department of Sports Science. So welcome William. Thanks for having me, Dady. We are excited to have you at Rakek University. Can you start by telling us a bit about your background and what drove you to make a career in sports psychology and how did you end up in Edinburgh? Sure. Well, I grew up, but always loving sports. Sports was my favorite thing to do to watch, to read about. I knew growing up that I wanted to do something in sports that maybe sports medicine or sports journalism. Then during my bachelor's, I came across sports psychology, and that's the field that really stood out to me because there are a lot of fields in sport where you can maybe help athletes and medicine, you're helping them heal and get better. But I wanted to do something that was going to help them be excellent when they're already healthy in a zero way to help them get even better at their sport and perform at an even higher level. And sports psychology was the answer for me. And you started onto one park and many other great professionals at Miami University? That's right. Yeah. I went to Miami University for my masters and went all the way from sunny California to Ohio in the middle of fields and high and cold and snow. But I went there because professors like Dr. Bob Weinberg, Dr. Robin Veeley, were there. They had a very established program and the chance to learn directly from those really well-established experience, respected researchers and practitioners in the field was something that I really wanted to give me the best training possible. And then you decided you liked the range, so you moved to Europe, specifically in England, the lunch culture. That's right. It just gets rainier and colder for me. But again, it was for chances to work with the best. So I went to University of Essex where I studied under Ian Maynard, Joanne Butt and Paul Freeman, who were my PhD supervisors. And that's where I got into pressure training. Pressure training was a topic that I felt was really needed in sports psychology because of my experience in applied practice in sports psychology, whether that was with athletes or with a military population that I worked with. We do a lot of mental skills training where we're teaching skills in classrooms or in one-on-one sessions. But I felt like we needed to be doing something when athletes are actually on the pitch or on the court training. I'm sure we'll get more into that. So yeah, I wanted to specifically ask you about pressure training. You've done on published three shows in the area. You worked with military athletes. I know you're teaching on the subject. What is pressure training and how is it used in various contexts if you give us like the lay of the lump? Yeah, pressure training is where we're strategically increasing levels of psychological pressure in a training environment so that the athlete or the soldier or musical performance performer can get a chance to get used to performing their skills under pressure. So by getting them used to levels of pressure or acclimatizing to pressure, they then have chances to learn how to cope with pressure, learn how to apply the mental skills they might have learned from a sports psychologist in a setting that is representative of what they're going to face in competition. We don't want athletes to have an easy time in training and feel like their skills are top notch and then they get into competition and for the first time they're feeling this sense of pressure that is not a recipe for success for an athlete. Can you give us some example of like benefits of pressure training when it's done well? Where it has been done well? Yeah, when pressure training is done well when it's done systematically and it's well thought through and pressure is really created effectively, not just you know a little punishment here and there, but actual pressure is created in training, then athletes can receive a few different benefits. So one might be that they improve their coping skills. Maybe they had learned something about how to relax or use self-talk before, but now they're able to kind of workshop those skills and figure out well, what is the self-talk that works best for them or when do they forget to use their self-talk or when do they rush their pre-performance routine or what are some ingredients of a pre-performance routine that they need to add. So that's one benefit is that they hone those coping skills. Another benefit would be that they change their relationship with pressure, the more that they're exposed to pressure and the more opportunities they have to train under that environment. So an athlete who hasn't experienced much pressure in competition or hasn't experienced pressure training, I think, oh, pressure. That's a bad thing. I get anxious and then I make mistakes. I don't want to face pressure. Then once they have experienced pressure training, they're able to say actually pressure isn't necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to perform worse. So what we call competitive anxiety, pre-competition. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Exactly. You have to find tools to work with it. Right. You have to find tools to work with. You know that it's going to exist. A research on pressure training has shown that even if you are trained under pressure, that doesn't mean that you're not going to feel anxious at all. But what it does mean is that you've had a chance to learn how to cope with that pressure. I saw that pressure training has been like an exposure therapy where patients with phobias or spiders flying, these kinds of things. They're gradually exposed to the thing that they fear to reduce their anxiety towards it. Can anybody help and do it? Does the sports psychologist have to be involved or can coaches implement plans on their own, the silent implement plans on their own? Yeah, that's an interesting question. In the research that my colleagues and I have done, we have been looking at pressure training that's being conducted by sports psychologists, but in close collaboration with coaches. So the sports psychologist might have the background knowledge and training on how to create pressure. They're coming to the coaches and athletes with ideas based in research on how to create pressure in training as well as knowing important ingredients to incorporate into that pressure training, such as making sure that they're communicating to athletes about the purpose of pressure training, and they are holding a debrief to make sure that athletes are learning from whatever they did in pressure training. I think eventually the goal should be to get coaches comfortable where they can conduct pressure training, and many coaches probably would say that they do conduct pressure training even if they don't use the term pressure training. So I think coaches should be able to conduct pressure training in that way. Pressure training becomes not this special thing that the sports psychologist does, you know, once in a blue moon, but it becomes part of what a team does, part of an athlete's training regimen. At the same time, we have to make sure that those coaches are trained up adequately to conduct pressure training safely and effectively. So in many cases right now, sports psychologists might be necessary to help coaches conduct pressure training. So how important is the awareness of the athletes that they are aware that this has been done, you know, and there's a benefit to be had? How important is to involve the athletes in the in the whole process because sometimes you would hear coaches say, yeah, I'm doing pressure training, but I'm not, you know, I'm not raising their awareness because I want them to be surprised by the situation, you know. I see that logic from coaches and part of coaching is to prepare athletes for situations that weren't expected. I think right now we still would encourage coaches and sports psychologists to involve athletes, be transparent about the purpose and the process of pressure training with athletes. Most athletes won't have gone through pressure training yet. And to surprise them with, say, consequences that are intended to create pressure, there might be a good intent behind that, but you run the risk of getting athletes to think that, well, this was just a coach who reacted poorly and got mad and wanted them to do some kind of consequence, pay a price for performing poorly and athletes might misconstrue that as bullying or mistreating the athletes. So, transparency is important in that respect for the athletes well-being, but also for the effectiveness of pressure training. If we've got athletes who are on board who know that this is going to help them perform when it matters most, they're going to buy in that much more and they're going to want to have those pressure manipulations that increase in pressure added to their training. And they're also probably going to reflect more on their coping skills rather than reflect on how their coach was mean to them. So, if I'm a coach, you know, who wants to challenge my athletes, what should I keep in mind when I want to start to design the pressure and challenges into my training environment? You'll want to keep in mind what actually creates pressure for athletes. To some extent, it's going to depend on individual differences and personalities of the athletes, the age, group, the sport, the culture of the sport, but I don't think we just want to say, oh, it depends on the individual. Coaches should be aware of what pressure is and what will create that pressure. It's not just about creating any kind of challenge or difficult situation. For example, some pressure manipulations that haven't been quite as effective in the literature would be distractions, something like crowd noise or distracting noises that's often said to be a form of pressure training. Now, distractions and noise, you know, that might test an athlete's attention control that might be helped them mentally, but that doesn't provide the sense of increased importance of a situation that pressure provides. So instead of something like adding crowd noise, coaches might instead use some form of judgment that could mean bringing in the senior team head coach to watch an academy training session, or another authority figure, or publicizing athlete's performance in training. So they can't hide from mistakes. It's all up there for their teammates and coaches to judge. So that's one thing that coaches should be aware of what actually creates pressure and not just creating any kind of challenge or difficulty in calling that pressure. On that note, you know, some coaches saying football they might, you know, think that taking their team to, you know, military style bootcamp or something like that is, and I've had fact away to, you know, test their, you know, mental metal. So how should they concentrate on doing that specific, you know, more related to the actual things that they will encounter within their sport, or are these kind of things also effective, you know, taking them into the military style bootcamp, or something like that? I want to end down that there's some benefit to taking athletes to a military style bootcamp. There's going to be a lot to learn from those situations. But I would hesitate to say that that training is necessarily going to translate into, let's say, football players taking a penalty kick to win the match is not sport-specific in flipping tires on a beach, like the military might do, or some other kind of strenuous exercise. That might help the athletes in another way, in other forms of resilience. But I think if we were trying to train athletes for specific pressure situations in their sport, it makes a lot more sense to train them in that same context. There is some question in the research about transferability. Does, do you have to train every single skill in a sport in order for athletes to perform that well under pressure? Or if I train my tennis serves under pressure, will I be able to hit a forehand under pressure? Maybe that pressure training will translate. That's something that future research could look into. Can you explain a little bit about the pressure training decision tree? Because the way I understand it is not everybody needs to be or should be exposed to pressure training. Yeah, so the pressure training decision tree is a tool that coaches can use to decide should they train their athletes under pressure? Should they conduct pressure training? That tree would contain questions about what's first, what's the purpose of the sports program that the coach is coaching their athletes in? If it's about participation or developing interest in a sport, this would mostly take place at the youth level. Well, that might not be the time for pressure training because performance isn't a priority. But if performance is a priority, these athletes are already committed to their sport. It's a competitive league. There is at least some priority to win, then you likely will want to be pressure training. And then there are also other questions that you might be asking yourself like, is this a skill that athletes often have to perform under pressure? Or is this a skill that you've noticed? Athletes are performing poorly when faced with pressure. And if the answer is yes, then you probably want to be conducting pressure training. You mentioned youth sports and every generation seems to think that the next one lacks resilience and soft, compared to their own. Do you have any comments on that? Does that show in research or that you know of? I know that there are researchers looking into Gen Z and probably also millennials on their resilience or other behaviors that are characteristic of those generations. And I can't say for sure if those generations truly lack resilience compared to older generations, but anecdotally, it often seems like younger generations nowadays do lack resilience or they are not accustomed to failing, to finding themselves in difficult situations. So that's very likely I can't say with any hard evidence that that's true or it could just be what you're saying that as we get older, every generation is never as tough as we were. But I would say that the need for not just pressure training, but psychological skills training in general is always going to be there and sports psychologists and coaches. Our job is to adapt to the generations. If we're criticizing generations too much for not being tough enough, well, we've got to look in the mirror and say, well, why is that? If we're the older generations, we're the ones leading them, teaching them, raising them, then we must be doing something wrong if those younger generations as a whole are not being as tough as we want. So it's more about understanding their realities and maybe try to meet them in their reality and not just write them off. That's right. Because they're growing up in an environment and that environment is shaping them. I don't think they're coming out. They're not being born any different than other human beings in the past. I'm curious to know how training pressure situation is transferred over to high stress moments in competition like when you're competing in an Olympic final. Some then claim that it's impossible to copy or replicate the actual stress of being in a World Cup penalty shootout. Some coaches would say that training for it could be counterproductive. What would be your take on this? The question about whether you can replicate the pressure of competition always comes up when talking about pressure training. But it doesn't worry me that much for a few reasons. One is that it's not always appropriate to replicate that level of pressure in training. If you've got athletes who are really struggling under pressure, well, you wouldn't want to put the same level of pressure on them in training you'd want to gradually work them up. Just like if you've got a really physically weak athlete, you wouldn't put a maximum amount of weight on a bench press and expect them to lift that weight same thing psychologically. Also, just because we can't replicate the level of pressure in a World Cup final doesn't mean we shouldn't try because we are habituating athletes to some level of pressure, getting them used to performing at some level of pressure, whether we're doing pressure training or not. So if you say, "Oh, well, we can't replicate the World Cup. What's the point?" then you're getting your athletes used to training at a relatively low level of pressure. And we wouldn't have such high standards for other aspects of performance. If your club is preparing to face Lionel Messi, you wouldn't say, "Oh, well, we can't replicate Messi. Nobody can." So we're going to take training off today. What's the point? You're still going to train. You're still going to work on tactics that will help prepare your players as much as possible. You also work in military settings. So I have a question about how that is similar or different to working in sports settings and then maybe again the same question as before. When it really comes down to being in a situation where it's a question of life or death, is that something you could replicate or prepare for and how have you been tackling this? So I worked with the military before completing my PhD on pressure training. And that position was mostly about mental skills training. We did that in workshops. We did that out in the field with the soldiers or in one-on-one sessions. And during that time with the military, I recognized that it wasn't enough to do those workshops in one-on-one sessions. So I did begin to do what would be a very primitive version of pressure training with some units. And there are some similarities. And of course, some differences. Similarities being that soldiers need many of the same mental skills as athletes. So it could be that they are doing bomb defusal, bomb disposal. And we did some of this primitive pressure training with them where they're operating their robots to defuse bombs. And that requires fine motor skills and attention. And you can imagine the pressure that they might be facing. Communication skills, self-control. Absolutely. Yeah, you're working as a team and you've got to communicate clearly. And anxiety we know is one factor that can disrupt communication that can narrow people's attention given them tunnel vision instead of, say, communicating with their teammates. There's a sports occlusion and training pressure applied to other areas, like such as police, rescue units, business, education, even. We did a meta-analysis a few years ago where we looked at pressure training, pressure training studies across domains. Most of those studies were in sport, but we did find a few studies done with law enforcement. And those studies along with most of the sport studies found that pressure training can improve performance in law enforcement. Those studies looked at performance in law enforcement training scenarios. So do police officers perform better in their drills after pressure training? There's still a question of how well does that translate into real world scenarios. So what are the things that seems to be mindful and careful about when exposing people to pressure? Are there any ethical situations or questions that you have confronted or heard about? And are there any limits to consider? Earlier, we were talking about how should coaches be involved? Should you tell athletes? Should athletes be aware of pressure training? And that's all because of ethical risks of pressure training, which it definitely do exist. Pressure training is unique in sports psychology in that way compared to something like imagery or goal setting. If an imagery or goal setting workshop doesn't go well, well, you know, there's not much loss in you. Maybe you wasted a couple hours of the athlete's time. With pressure training, it can be misconstrued as coaches just trying to discipline athletes or even bully athletes. And we don't want that. And that's why research doesn't need to look at how to deliver pressure training most effectively, how to get buy in from athletes. At the same time, I don't think we should get too caught up in worrying about ethics as long as we've got those processes in place because it also wouldn't be very ethical if we didn't prepare athletes for pressure. We've got so many sports organizations that are emphasizing performance and winning. We can't say to our athletes, okay, we're not going to do anything. We're not going to put any pressure on you because we care so much about your well-being. But also, you better go out there in the Olympics and win our country a gold medal. That, I mean, would not be ethical to withhold that preparation and that preparation probably needs to include those athletes facing some pressure in training. So maybe AIDS could be a factor where you have to consider that you don't train kids in the same way as adults and that even when you expose kids to these kind of things that are, you know, parents or themselves are involved somehow. Definitely. AIDS should be a consideration. And we do have some pressure training studies that have looked at youth sport, not a lot, but some have looked at pressure training and football academy. So if we can't researcher in the UK has conducted a pressure training intervention on youth football academies and you definitely need to consider what's age appropriate, what is the level of pressure that's appropriate for youth sport and also zoom out and remember what is the priority for an organization or a program. It's perfectly fine for an organization not to be focused on performance and winning. And if that's the case, then I wouldn't push pressure training on them. So you touched a little bit earlier about, you know, using punishment. But you also written about like, you know, calling it like negative consequences, building those into the training. Can you sort of dance around, you know, either concept, you know, is there a difference in what you would call punishment? Just for punishment's sake or building in negative consequences that are designed to you know, a sort of pressure. I think a negative consequence is a consequence based on performance in training that causes an athlete to lose something, they value or do something undesirable. So losing something, they value that could be, you know, losing a chance to start the next match or even losing and at the coaches, you respect or, you know, or esteem of them as a player based off of poor performance in training. And that's a negative consequence that isn't necessarily a punishment. It's just something that the athlete wishes they would avoid. They wish to make a good impression on their coach. And if they crack under pressure, then they're losing that opportunity. Now, some negative consequences can also be actions or tasks that athletes have to do after training that are undesirable. Examples might be having to clean the changing room after training if you don't perform up to standard. That, you know, you can't hide from the fact that that is a form of punishment. The difference between using that as a consequence and just purely as a punishment to discipline athletes is, it goes back to what we were talking about how we're informing athletes were being transparent about the purpose of pressure training. So if coaches are transparent saying you have to, you have to clean the changing room if you don't score this high in a drill or you don't perform up to this standard, then athletes can understand that, yeah, they still don't want to clean those changing rooms. But now they understand the purpose behind it and can understand how, well, even though it's uncomfortable, it's not something they want to be facing. They understand the value. Whereas punishment may be the athletes don't even know that punishment is possible until the coach gets mad. There's no or very different learning that they're going to get from that situation. And there may be the importance of the coach being consistent, you know, if he does it as a one off or just on a whim that it might seem that he's coming off as a, you know, he's just mad. Yeah. So I think I mentioned, you know, pressure training, needing needing to be systematic and well planned. And that's exactly the reason if players aren't going to get anything out of a coach who's unpredictable and doing things on a whim. But if it's well planned out if pressure training is consistent and athletes can go into a training session, practicing their pre-performance routine because they know they've got to perform really well in order to avoid a consequence, they're going to develop that much more than, you know, waltzing into training, thinking it's just another day and then being shocked when they have to face this punishment. As a coach, I've worked with players who've been in penalty competitions, penalty shootouts, you know, age 12, 14, 16, and then professional players. And it's just amazing how, you know, how much of a psychological effect a penalty shootout will have. So is it worth for coaches at a young age to, you know, reframe the penalty shootout in the mind of the players that to tell them, you know, it's something that you have to step up to and make it a positive growth experience instead of to say, you have to score? I think so. By framing it as a development opportunity and something that athletes are going to have to face, then those athletes who hear that message, they're going to be able to reflect on however they did, whether they made the penalty kick or they missed. If they know that this is part of their development, they're going to be able to focus on what they could have done better or what they did well, instead of being so outcome focused. So I definitely agree. We're rewarding them for stepping up basically, you know. Yeah, yeah, really at any level, rewarding the behaviors that we want to see is going to pay off so much more than forcing a certain outcome and getting athletes to focus solely on that outcome because it's not that outcomes aren't important, but athletes are going to know about the outcome. They are going to think about the outcome. We don't know if athletes are going to focus on the process if we don't coach them to do so. Famous research article from, like, about a technical claim that talent needs trauma. Do you agree with this? And, you know, it was this trauma. Maybe I misunderstood word in this context. I would disagree with that slightly. I have no doubt that people who have experienced trauma have gained something from that trauma that they can then take on to the court or into the professional world into their lives. I don't know that you talent or achievement in sport requires trauma. I don't know the biographies of every single elite athlete out there, but I'd be really surprised if there weren't any elite athletes who lived a very comfortable middle-class life with very supportive parents. That doesn't, I don't think that precludes you from becoming an elite athlete. What should we be studying now about performance and the pressure and what are the gaps in the literature and research that we should be, you know, looking towards and exploring the future? One would be what we mentioned briefly about transferability. The question about whether training one skill or one situation under pressure would transfer to other skills or situations within the same sport. That has important implications because coaches and sports psychologists need to know if they do pressure training for penalty kicks and football. Do they also need to conduct pressure training in other situations? Another area for future research would be looking at follow-up testing, follow-up post tests in intervention studies because we don't know yet how long the effects of benefits of pressure training last. So if you do two weeks of pressure training and athletes are getting more and more comfortable coping with pressure, then are those effects of pressure training still present a few weeks later, a few months later, or is pressure training something that needs to be done consistently? I think the question of frequency, how often you need to conduct pressure training is an important one that we don't know the answer to yet. Good. So final question, no, you lived in different countries and you know, working in different contexts. Are there any cultural issues that we should be aware of? You know, would there be any difference in working in Iceland and the UK or America? I would imagine so and that's something that I've thought about as well being coming from a different country from where I work now in the UK. I don't know the answer to that of what are the cultural sensitivities, the cultural differences that we would have to be aware of, but it's likely that it's going to be a consideration. I think cultural differences are always a consideration to be aware of for sports psychologists, whether it's in pressure training or another intervention, another setting. So being culturally aware is going to be important. I can think off the top of my head, maybe there are going to be cultural differences about, you know, what is acceptable for athletes or people in a culture to be doing in terms of consequences or forfeits and especially things like authority. Some cultures are very top down and you really respect authority. So the performance director of your national governing body coming to watch you train that might have a different effect on somebody in that top down culture compared to one that is a little bit more democratic or egalitarian where maybe authority figures are respected but are not revered in the same way. Interesting. Thank you, William, for speaking to us and I hope you have a good stay in Iceland. Very interesting and appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Daddy.