Barbell Shrugged - BS INTERROGATION SERIES - EP2 w/Dawn Fletcher of MentalityWOD

Episode Date: May 31, 2013

Are you a basket case right before a WOD?  What about right before or during a competition?  Mentality WOD's Dawn Fletcher explains how to improve your workouts and how to perform better during competition by building confidence and learning to relax.  Don't miss episode two of the Barbell Shrugged Interview Series!

Hi, this is Mike Bledsoe here on Barbell Shrug on our interview series. I have Dawn Fletcher from Mentality WOD with us today. We're going to be talking a little bit about what she does and how she helps CrossFit athletes. First, I just want to remind everybody to make sure to check out our website, barbellshrug.com. Make sure to sign up for our newsletter. That way we can inform you of all the stuff we've got coming up. We do some training camps, and we have some stuff like that going on that we're not real good about mentioning on the podcast all the time. And then also, if you're listening to this in the future, and some things that we're doing has already passed,

then you can get updates on those things. Also, make sure to go to Facebook and like us, like our fan page, and go to Twitter. Follow us at BarbellShrug. And if you really like the podcast, head over to iTunes and give us a five-star rating and leave some sweet comments for us. We enjoy that. So we have Don Fletcher here with MentalityWOD. And I somehow, I found you because people were retweeting some of your posts.

And a lot of times when I see these motivational posts, I unfollow those people. But I saw your posts and they were actually helpful. Some people post these gimmicky type things. But I actually thought your posts were and they were actually helpful. There's some people like, you know, they post like these gimmicky type things, but I actually thought your posts were, they grabbed my attention. I went to your website and I read some blog posts, but I found what you're doing is very unique

and it's not really anything anyone else is doing in the CrossFit community right now. Thanks, Mike. It's good to actually, it's refreshing to hear that because that's pretty much my strategy is to try to stay away from the cheerleading type motivational posts. I think those are great, but I'm trying to provide just like a little bit more of a perspective and some value to my posts. What exactly is MentalityWog? Basically, it's just a website to give athletes and CrossFitters tips on how to get the most out of their workouts, whether they're just general fitness or performance athletes.

Really just about dialing in those intangible factors that are not measurable and how to get their thoughts and emotions to work for them instead of against them. How did you get started in this and doing this like mental preparation type stuff with competitors? I'm going to make a like long background kind of short, but basically I think ever since I was in like junior high school and playing sports, I started to become just kind of really interested in the sports psychology and mental aspect of, of sport and performance. Ever since then, I've just been studying kinesiology and sports psychology, like deciding if I was gonna be

the best coach that I could be, I needed to learn the physical and mental aspect of it. And every athlete and every client that I've ever trained over eight years, it always came back to the mental aspect. That's what we always ended up talking about, like how you can get more out of your workouts or your training or your sport, um, always came back to some of these, you know, mental components. And so I just continued to kind of study that and then

decided a couple of years ago that, you know, the community that I'm, I'm really, really interested in helping is, is this CrossFit community, because community because I just think the sport and the program is just so intriguing. And I thought, all right, I'm just going to put this website out there and help whoever I can. I remember I was an exercise science major when I was in college, and I remember having to take sports psych. And I thought it was total bullshit at the time you know I was like um I I had come out of the military where like they had like beaten into you just to be tough and so like I probably had some mental toughness built into me that I didn't understand why other people didn't have it or yeah there's probably some aspects of sports

psychology that would have been good for me but but I was so stubborn at the time. What's funny is at the time, you know, as a college student, I was thinking it was total BS, whatever. People just need to toughen up and get over it and all that kind of stuff. And then now as I'm coaching, you know, I've been coaching CrossFit since 2007. And I'm encountering, you know, the games level athletes and all that type of stuff and i'm like oh shit we've got to like like really approach this now i'm reading nothing by psychology books that's awesome and i wish that i had i had really paid attention and done better uh in that class because that was one of those classes where like i was i was like really steep

in the physiology and biomechanics and all that stuff when it came to sports psych i saw i i really slacked off and that can actually be the difference between a great coach you know a good coach and a great coach is if they can really communicate with their athletes and uh yeah oh i agree and i was kind of the same i was kind of the same way you were like I mean, I did like eight years of psychology, studying different aspects of psychology. And I would say like 80% of the time, I'm like, what is this shit? It just didn't speak my language. And it was a lot of philosophy and theory. And it just didn't seem like, I don't know, it just didn't seem like my thing.

But I thought, can I do something with this that makes sense to, like, the general athlete and, like, the person who's just, like, they have a life outside of sport. But, you know, they're coming in there. They want to do their best. Like, so I try to put it in a language that just makes sense and, you know, something that athletes and people can use instead of talking about all the kind of philosophy and theory and all the psychobabble that comes along with it. Yeah. What, well, what are the,

like the, I guess the top five ways that I can improve my mentality as a competitive athlete? Well, you know, when we talk about competitive athletes, it gets a little bit different than the, you know,

the general person who's, who's training or tries just trying to get a good workout. Um, but, but when you want to get onto that level of, you know, competitive CrossFit or competitive sport, you really need to work with someone or get to that place where you can understand your gaps and become really aware of like, um, you know, some potential setbacks that you either are having or some, um, some thought patterns that maybe aren't as good as you might think some potential setbacks that you either are having or some thought patterns that maybe aren't as good as you might think that they are that are holding you back or restricting you from performing your best. So one of the biggest things is helping athletes kind of find those gaps. You know, just like in regular strength and conditioning, you got to know what

your weaknesses are before you start attacking them. And so it's the same thing with kind of mental performance training. So that's a huge thing is kind of learning your gaps. Another thing is learning how to manage your energy. You know, in competition, there's going to be times you need to be really amped up. There's going to be times you need to calm down and keep your cool. And it actually is a learned thing. You know, you need to learn how to control your energy and what works for you to get pumped up or to get calmed down. Everybody's different.

That's a huge thing that I work on with athletes at the competitive level is learning that emotional control so that they can handle different situations. I coach a lot of weightlifters. A lot of the weightlifters will go you know i want to wait till i'm really good before i compete oh god yeah and i'm like i'm like don't do that because what will happen is you're going to become a really good weightlifter and you're going to go compete and you're going to be a sucky competitive weightlifter absolutely right you got to practice competing as you're getting better at weightlifting so you got to go out there and just perform at your current level. And then,

because then you're gonna have to learn how to compete and that's going to be, that's right up there with just learning how to weightlift. A full learning curve. You're absolutely right. And that's my same philosophy too. You know, experience is going to be the,

is the best teacher, especially if you actually learn from your experience and kind of, you know, take notes on it, work with a coach on your experience, but absolutely right. You know, I'm like,

get out there and do it and, and start learning how to be a competitor. Another big thing is learning how to focus on what matters and only the task at hand in a competition is what matters. Trying to learn how to block out and deal with all those other distractions and things that are going on at an event. And, you know, all those uncontrollable things that you can't do anything about anyways. Of course, everyone knows that you shouldn't focus on those things, but it's a whole different story when the time comes and you're really just trying to focus on that next workout or that next lift, getting your mind to be used to training and being prepared to only focus on really what matters. And that's a really tough thing.

For our listeners, how should they gauge if your program, if it's something they can benefit from? Well, I would love, you know, I really, anybody that's trying to improve or reach a certain goal, you know, fitness or competition or whatever can and needs to learn how to control their thoughts and emotions. You know, it all comes back to our our kind of perspectives on things and and again, how we can control our thoughts, how we can control our emotions, how we can get more focused and confident and calm and all those things. So it goes beyond fitness and sport and it really comes back to benefiting your total life and your just general life outlook and balance and things like that. So I put stuff on this site for everybody and everybody needs to improve their mentality, myself included. know it's an ongoing process just like fitness training it never stops you just try to you know have a better

perspective and a better outlook and you know clear thoughts so that you can focus on the stuff that matters in your life and reaching those and reaching those sport goals you were talking earlier about a little bit about like getting i guess hyped up in certain scenarios and staying calm in other scenarios and staying calm in other scenarios. And I know in like sports psychology, they talk a lot about being the arousal level. Yeah. So you have like, you know, you're under aroused or over aroused or, you know, you're right where you need to be. Yep.

And for like maybe a golfer, you know, the arousal level is not that high. Yep. And that's probably why it's a little quiet at a weightlifting meet. Yep. When they're doing a snatch as opposed to a powerlifting meet where you're going for a max deadlift. Uh, can you talk a little bit about, you know, arousal levels and maybe different types of competitions because in CrossFit it is so broad, you know, there's certain types of competitions where you need to try to calm it down or, or, or, uh, absolutely. I mean, that's, that's why like

working with CrossFitters and CrossFit, I've been coaching too, since about 2007, but working with these athletes, that's why it's like so fun for me because there's so many, there's so much different stuff, you know, and trying to get good at everything. It's like, it's, it's just such a cool thing to talk about for me. But you're right. Approaching a WOD, a quick kind of Fran workout is much, much different than going for your one rep max snatch. And all the different things that can come up in an event, it's really asking a lot of your emotional energy to be able to, again, get really, really amped up and then to get really calmed so that you don't waste a lot of energy. And the best athletes can do that in a matter of seconds. You know, if you work with some powerlifting guys and girls, they know exactly what they need to do in a matter of seconds to get amped before lift. And so the CrossFitter, you know, they need to know how to do that

and then get really calm so that they are not wasting a lot of that energy before a longer AMRAP or something. You don't want to be jacked through the roof knowing that you're going to have to do a 20-minute AMRAP. So the different time domains and kind of the different modalities and different movements in general are going to require a little bit of a different emotional energy. The thing is, you have to mess with it to know what works for you. And you see some people before a big lift calm and they look like they could fall asleep. And you look at some people and they look like they're going to break something. So you actually do have to practice trying different methods.

Watching other athletes, trying some things on your own, trying some different things in training until you find what works best for you. Yeah. I actually spent years and years and years listening to metal and gangster rap and all that stuff and people getting mad at me for the music I listened to while I was training. And then the last couple years, I started listening to much more mellow music. Really? When I train, and I've seen much better results from that,

because I find that being able to truly relax in between sets and using music that's going to help me relax in between lifts and stuff like that is more beneficial to me. Being able to, to, you know, get that rejuvenation is more beneficial than any type of anything that music can do to amp me up. Cause I personally don't hear music when I actually go for a lift or something. Yeah. No, I think that's super cool. And that just goes to show that sometimes we think that we're doing the right thing. And the athletes are like,

Oh, I'm good. Like, I don't need this, you know, mental training or coach or whatever. And then they start trying some different methods and they're like, what?

I thought what else before work, that shit wasn't even close. Yeah. I competed like that for years. And looking back, I was like, I really wish I would have discovered this sooner. And I do. I, uh, now with my athletes now I have them like hey in between sets relax you know don't

jump around and cuss at the ball and all that shit you just walk away sit down take a deep breath think about something else exactly and that right there is is you know that's all mental coaching that's all that's all part of it and you think about these athletes that are doing, you know, regional or games weekends and they have, you know, nine plus events in a weekend, how they have to be able to get to that relaxed state between events so that they're not wasting energy. That's one of the huge things that we talk about and work with these athletes on because you don't want to just be winging that when you get to that level yeah i uh one of my really good buddies who uh trains in my facility uh mike mcgoldrick he just won first place at the south central regional nice and uh he's gotten to be friends with uh asia bartow yeah and uh asia bartow has been we've gone back and forth quite a bit online and i i've got to meet him once super nice guy but uh mike mcgoldrick has been competing at every regional since i want to say 2009 yeah but asia bartow has been to the crossfit games and uh

mike what he was saying about him was he was so impressed at how calm he was in between wads. Like, nothing bothered him. He was really impressed by, like, Bart's ability to just take any situation that might not have been, you know, the best for him. And he was like, eh, whatever. And Mike, who I guess is a little bit less seasoned of an athlete, was kind of freaking out about this thing. He did his best to stay calm, but he was mostly impressed by Asia Barto's ability to just chill out and relax in between. He said that he could just see it. Sometimes you can walk around at a competition, see who can really relax in between. Oh, you can just see it. Sometimes you can walk around at a competition, see who can really relax

in between events and know who's going to do well. That's all I watch. I watch the athletes getting warmed up or before a workout, after a workout, their body language, and you can pinpoint it. It's just so clear and easy to see. What advice would you give someone who is brand new at competing or just brand new at CrossFit in general? You know, one of the biggest things is, especially if you want to get to the point where you're going to be competing, is to start writing things down. And not just obviously your workouts and your results, but also start writing things down like how you felt, if you had any breakdown moments, what you were thinking, you know, those negative thought patterns are like, if you've missed a lift, or if you just felt like you didn't do well in a WOD,

also writing that stuff down and taking notes on it, because there's patterns in everything that we do. And you can look back on some of this stuff and learn from it. And so if you want to get to that point where you're going to be, in CrossFit or anything else, it's best for you to be able to look back at your training and learn from certain thoughts, which led to certain actions, which led to certain thoughts and how to kind of make sure that again, you're doing what you can to control the things that you can actually control, which, you know, those things are always our thoughts, our attitudes, our perspectives, how we react to certain situations and missed lifts or bad workouts. So a huge thing is kind of tracking that. You don't have to track

it forever, but the athletes that do and the athletes that are more tuned into their thoughts and kind of aware of how they impact them, their workouts, those athletes are going to be the ones that can take that, you know, their game to the next level and learn from it, continue to grow as athletes. What do you have to say about, I guess, rituals and maybe developing rituals? I mean, it sounds like that kind of might be where you're going with that. Yeah, I mean, rituals, for whatever reason, got like a bad, bad name or whatever. But you know, routines is definitely something that I talk about. Like you want to establish as much of a consistent routine that works for you as you can.

You just don't want to swear by it because there's going to because CrossFit's the anti routine. You know, you're going to be in a place where there's going to be stuff thrown at you and all sorts of different, you know, things are going to be happening in your environment that you're going to have to react to. But developing rich routines is huge, especially in your warm up, especially in kind of your cool down. The way you're mentally preparing for something should be the same so that you're able to bring that anywhere you go. And again, that stuff all transfers over to just general life when you're dealing with like a work situation or relationship stress or whatever. The way you condition your mind and the way you prepare to take on certain things, um,

should be the same. And you should have a ritual kind of that routine that works for you. Yeah. It's definitely easier to have a ritual for, uh, something, a sport like weightlifting versus CrossFit. It is, it is. But there are things that you can do, you know, in that warm up time that are also, you know, yeah, you're prepping your body, but you should be prepping your mind too so that you're prepared when it is go time and you're not still trying to think about, you know, what am I going to do today or how am I going to push this, you know, certain aspect or whatever. So there's a lot of things you can do to mentally prepare before a workout. Do you do a lot of visualization? Yeah, some. Some people have a hard time with visualization and imagery, especially because it requires you to practice and take time and be quiet and be still. Most people are just flat out uncomfortable with that when they know that they would rather fit in an extra lifting session or something.

And so getting athletes to appreciate that is a huge part of it before they even do it and to appreciate how much that can help them visualizing success and visualizing. I have athletes visualize bad things happening during workouts and missing lifts and missing reps so that they know how to deal with it when it does happen. Um, so, so that visualization stuff is important and it's, and it's key to be able to slow down and process some of those things and take the time to actually think through them because just that in itself helps relieve, you know, relieve some stress and pressure when the situation does come. I, uh, I use visualization. Um, when I'm, when I'm good and healthy yes it a lot I

do find myself like working out in my sleep sometimes yeah I just say I'm visualizing in my sleep that's that's one way but when I'm when I'm injured I can't do certain movements sometimes I actually visualize say I can't do snatches right now like I still I try sit back, even if it's just five minutes a day, and run through my head what it feels like to do a snatch and all that kind of stuff. Did someone teach you about that or did you just pick it up on your own? That's actually something I learned in sports psych class and then I dismissed it as bullshit and now that I'm older. That class that you hated, huh?

I taught you something. It's crazy. Yeah then now that I'm older. That class that you hated, huh? I taught you something. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, that's cool. I mean, the thing is you have to learn it. You can't, I mean, it really helps to have someone kind of teach it to you and teach you the importance of it, teach you some ways to do it. That's actually imagery and visualization is the topic I've been posting about this week on Mentality WOD. So it's cool. You know, each week or each day,

I try to kind of get into some different topics to give people some tips and to help them out because you won't know how to do that unless, again, someone kind of shows you or teaches you. Do you visualize movements? Oh, absolutely. Visualize, you know, movements. Visualize how you want it to look and how you want it to feel.

Even doing that like in in the facility in the gym with a pvc pipe and closing your eyes and really kind of feeling that and just taking that extra extra time to visualize yourself um it's huge do you think uh for you what works better or for what do you find works better with a lot of people? So like first person visualization or third person? And people don't know what I'm talking about. That's first person is like. Yeah, it's feeling yourself or imagining watching yourself. Sometimes it works best for athletes to have video of themselves so that they can watch.

So say if you watched a video of yourself, you know, you know, trying for one rep max snatch and you miss the lift, you watch that video a couple times and then you close your eyes and you imagine yourself again, watch you imagine watching yourself hit that lift. So sometimes it's easier with the combination of video because then you can really just kind of close your eyes and and see yourself because you were just watching yourself. So a lot of people do best with that and kind of imagining themselves going through the situation. And then I find it best when you're at, you know, at the lift or you're at that moment to, you know, just do that first person visualization where you're actually feeling it and sensing it yourself. Okay.

If that makes sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Yeah. What are some of the biggest mistakes competitors make, I guess, in mental preparation for competition? What do you see like, you're like, whatever you do, don't do that? Oh, gosh. There's so many things we could go into here. Probably in competition, it's getting caught up with other things that are going on.

Again, kind of thinking about things that aren't going to necessarily affect your game plan. So people get caught up in what other competitors are doing or the placement of other athletes. Maybe something, there's drama going on with the judges or a certain situation at the venue. So getting caught up in that other stuff that, again, is going to take them away from what they need to be focusing on, which is some of their own performance strategies and techniques. So I see that a lot. And I think athletes, again, don't maybe recognize or realize how much they are getting consumed by other factors that are going to take

away from them focusing on what they need to do for the next workout or how they need to prepare, how they need to kind of take the steps to get themselves ready. So it's getting sidetracked a lot or getting consumed with factors that just don't really matter, You know, so that's probably the big, big thing. Okay, we're going to wrap this up. And where can people go if they're interested in checking out your blog? So mentalitywad.com is where I post Monday through Friday free tips on different, you know on different mental performance aspects. There's also a program on there, the Mental Edge Program, which is basically an online

access program. You get a username and password and you can sign on at any time to go through the program. It's set out so that you're going through the different steps of how to become a better athlete and a better competitor. Um, but really connecting with me on Twitter at mentality, WOD and Facebook so that you can stay connected with the tips, ask me questions and, um, you know, check out all the, you know, I have coaching options on there and the program on there, but, but really at the very minimum, just staying connected through social media so that you can, you can, you know, improve as an athlete and as a person.

Very cool. I also think it's good for coaches to check out too. So you know how to properly talk some of your athletes through some of their mental issues. We're trying to make sports psychology cool again. That's what I'm trying to do. Yes. Make sure to check out barbellshrug.com. Sign up for the newsletter if you haven't already

uh like us on facebook and uh follow us on twitter uh and i'll see you guys around that sound more like everyone else than anyone else Spreaker is the website which turns anyone into a radio DJ. Look on to Spreaker.com for listening to thousands of radio channels and start creating your own radio today.