Can you get too fired up for a big game?

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With the cricket World Cup moving into the knockout stages and the Black Caps performing well there has been a lot of talk in the press and by the commentators about choking. As well as choking there have been many comments about players being “pumped up” for a big game or having a look of calm focus prior to a big innings. 

The big question

Can you get too fired up before a big match?

The answer is yes, but it also depends on the individual player. What is too fired up for one person may be just the right level of focus for another.

Technically, how fired up an athlete gets is known in the sports psychology world as arousal. The optimum level of arousal has been studied fairly heavily over the years in the hopes of finding the “sweet spot” where players are in the optimal zone for high performance. In a nutshell, it has been found that the level differs for different people. This means that athletes must find where they fit on the arousal spectrum for performing to the best of their ability.

This spectrum is traditionally seen as a bell curve.

As you can see, if a person is under-aroused, when they perform they may be lacking enthusiasm or interest which can cause errors or lack of effort in performing their assigned tasks. If a person is over-aroused they may become anxious or act in a hot-headed or rash way causing the accuracy of tasks to suffer also.

Choking

Generally when there is the talk of players “choking” it is as a result of them being over-aroused. It is part of the fight, fright or flight response that anxiety often initiates. This can cause athletes to shy away from performing on the field the way they need to (flight). It can also cause athletes to simply freeze when they need to react to a situation (fright) – similar to a deer in the headlights. The final part of this response to anxiety is the hot-headed reactions you sometimes see in athletes (i.e. state of origin fights) where anxiety or arousal levels are too high which causes the fight response to be prevalent.

Finding middle ground

The ideal for athletes is to find the middle ground between being too fired up and being too relaxed. There are a number of ways to do this. Firstly an athlete needs to practice self-awareness. They need to know the level of arousal at which they are at their best. Without first knowing where they perform well an individual is unable to work on getting to this state on a regular basis. Once this level has been found, there are many techniques which can be used to raise or lower the level of arousal as appropriate (either before or during a game). These are known as mental skills and can be as simple as breathing exercises or as complex as guided meditation. 

Mental skills

If you are interested in this type of mental skills training a good book for both coaches and athletes alike is “Going Mental in Sport: Excelling Through Mind-management” by Gary Hermansson. Gary Hermansson was a lecturer of mine at university but has worked with New Zealand Commonwealth games teams as well as a number of international teams and athletes, so this book is written from a point of view of someone who has been at the business end of high-level competition.

Mental skills can allow athletes to raise and lower their level of arousal during matches and before they take the field which can be the difference between a good and bad performance once you reach the elite level. Some things which seem innocuous to many may, in fact, be part of these mental skills rituals in order to regain focus on the match after “switching off” for a period of time. 

One example could be Black Caps player Corey Anderson undoing the Velcro on his batting gloves after he gets off strike and then doing them up again prior to facing the next ball – it may be his way of getting his focus back, perhaps saying to himself “ok now I am back on strike, focus on the ball” or whatever his coaches have told him he needs to focus on during the delivery. Have a look next time you are watching a big game to see if you can spot any little rituals that players perform.

Get in touch

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject or any other aspects of sport performance I would love to hear from you. Feel free to comment on Facebook or Instagram, or you can email me at david@360degreefitness.co.nz.
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(The graph above is taken used under Creative Commons License from Yerkes and Dodson 1908 - Diamond DM, et al. (2007). "The Temporal Dynamics Model of Emotional Memory Processing: A Synthesis on the Neurobiological Basis of Stress-Induced Amnesia, Flashbulb and Traumatic Memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson Law". Neural Plasticity: 33. doi:10.1155/2007/60803. PMID 17641736).