WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Healthy as a Horse: Episode 3 - Sports Psychology

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

Coach Kurt Kirner joins Ella to discuss psychology's connection to athletics. He explains the importance of mental toughness being connected to physical skill.

Welcome to Healthy as a Horse where we discuss health and wellness for Hillsdale Chargers. I'm Ellen Malone and our guest today is Coach Kurt Kerner. He is the head women's swim coach and fourth psychology professor here at Hillsdale. He is my coach because I'm on the team. I'm a sophomore here and we spend a lot of time developing mental skills that support our physical skills. So today we're going to be discussing why this emphasis on psychology is necessary in sports. So welcome to the show, coach. Thank you for having me.

So if you could start out with providing an overview of why the mental side is important first for performance and then get into why it's important for the athlete's well-being. It's interesting because whenever we are to perform, we need to stay in the here and now. And often what ends up happening is we dwell about the past or we worry about the future. And that's not going to help us for any type of performance. We are creatures of self-preservation. in our lives, we want to make sure that we are held in the highest esteem based upon our skill set. And when things are important to us, such as our major or in athletics, our sport, we place a very high value on those things.

And those things can definitely add a lot of stress. And stress affects our ability to be able to perform. and when we think about all of the time we put into physical practice. In fact, in my sports psychology class, and one of the first things I ask is, you know, think about your best performance ever, and then I have them visualize it. Think about your worst performance ever,

and then I have them visualize that, usually a little bit shorter in the worst performance. But I asked them, okay, no, what was the difference? You know, was it some physical skill? Was it something that you did? Or was it something that was a mental process? almost all the time they'll come up with that it's 70 to 90% psychological or mental and just 25 to 20% physical.

We certainly spend a lot of time doing different types of exercises such as cognitive diffusion. A lot of the exercises are really good just for thought processes and trying to allow us to keep those thought processes based upon what we've practiced physically to be able to go and do. Keep those thoughts into things that we have more control over instead of letting them control us. This year, our team has focused a lot on emotional stability and mental toughness. Why are we focusing on these two specifically? Yeah, you know, emotions don't help us a lot of times. You know, so many of the emotions are what we consider to be negative.

and I don't necessarily believe from all of the research and reading I've done that, you know, you need to be fully positive. It's interesting because not everything that's successful in life is positive. You know, you go through a lot of things that, you know, we fail and we learn from failure and we're able to build upon that. But I like to reference it in terms of constructive, kind of a constructive, kind of a constructive. mindset. I'm super grateful that as a coach, you incorporate this into our practices, but what are some practical ways other athletes can incorporate these principles if their coaches aren't focusing on it? Currently, we have this idea of perfectionism. And we know based upon everything that we've learned from the Bible that, you know, humans are not perfect. And yet we still think that we need

to be perfect. I like to reframe it. looking at striving for excellence. We can control strive for excellence, but we can't control perfectionism. Some days are going to be on, some days we're going to be off. The most important features of any mental practice is the idea of having process goals and following through those through a type of journaling or a diary and asking yourself some tough questions and being honest with yourself. And as you look at those things, you kind of make sense out of the idea is that you have the skill and you have a certain level of ability. And you know, you use that to just continue to better yourself. And then the thoughts don't run away from us. We're able to catch

ourselves early and say, hey, I really need to focus on what's present in the here and now. Awesome. Well, thank you for being here today. We'll have to have you back to talk more about your growth mindset, but for now, I'm Ellen Malone, and this has been Healthy as a Horse for Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM.