During the URB Brain Basket initiative, the Rennes basketball club (URB) invited me to reflect on Mental Endurance in high-performance sport. Two prominent figures from the basketball world also joined this session of sharing and discussion: Yannick Bokolo, a former international player, and Mehdi Mary, current coach of CSP Limoges.
It was an opportunity for me to share this collective reflection and to offer a few key points on Mental Endurance in sport.
What is Mental Endurance?
Notion of temporality. From a mental perspective, mental endurance can be broken down into several timeframes, across multiple scales/dimensions:
1/ at the scale of immediate effort: what we might call the "immediate suffering" during training or competition. This questioning that can arise in the athlete's mind: "why make this effort?", "why push even harder?"
This recurring question in the athlete's head, whether in team or individual sport, is a question about the search for meaning. Truly the main lever for the player, the coach, the mental coach, the physical staff, (...) is the goal. It is the answer to that question. It answers the search for performance. It gives the green light to accelerate, to keep going, to fight, to believe. It nourishes team cohesion.
Mental endurance, like endurance for physical effort, for concentration, for courage and self-sacrifice, has a source — and that source is a clear, understood, and beneficial goal. Giving meaning to the action.
2/ at the scale of a season: enabling performances to last, being able to re-mobilize despite cycles of results (when you win, when you lose, when it's inconsistent, when there are underperformances or peak performances). A season for an athlete is something constantly changing and unstable. The work is precisely to enable the capacity to re-engage, to withstand criticism, to learn to manage emotions that can be triggered by the echo of social media ... for example.
3/ at the scale of a career: because if there's an even greater unknown, it's this one. It relates to choices and performances. It depends on the athlete's age but above all on their maturity as a person and as an athlete. Continue to believe in yourself? Learn to know yourself. Decide to re-commit for one or more seasons. Define, redefine your goals, your desires. Those are the challenges of mental endurance at the career level.
Each of the three calls on courage, on work, on effort, on determination and, for me, on humility as well.
And whether at one or another of these three dimensions/timeframes, we can say that good emotional management contributes to the quality of an athlete's mental endurance.
Body + Mind
Can we separate Mental Endurance from this body + mind association? It's hard to imagine. A question I find fascinating to explore with the athlete or their staff is: "when does the body help the mind and when does the mind help the body?" For me, this reflection may be one of the cornerstones of the athlete's performance and of mental endurance. The principle is as follows: the athlete and their staff work technically, tactically and physically to progress. This work allows them to broaden their sporting skills. Mental work consists precisely in enriching this virtuous circle. Training helps the mind, and the mind strengthens the capacity to train.
This ideal virtuous circle nourishes: motivation, self-confidence, determination, commitment (...) and many other aspects that contribute to both performance and mental and physical endurance. Where does the mind stop? Where does the body begin? No athlete will tell you that one does not go with the other. And whether with the help of a mental coach or without, the athlete will naturally draw on both to continue reaching their performance goals.
Mental work enriches the athlete's daily practice in their search for performance. Mental endurance is a major component of the success of the high-performance athlete.
Mental endurance in the face of assaults from "external elements"
Here are some of the most well-known potential "assailants" of mental endurance:
The crowd, criticism, the press, pressure, the stakes, the environment, the unknown, instability, changes in team or club objectives... and many more.
Fortunately, they can also be powerful catalysts for the athlete, enabling them to seek and find resources again and again.
That's why I talk about a virtuous circle that allows one to feed off external elements, contextual factors and training to strengthen mental endurance. Mental endurance isn't reserved for endurance sports. It's the capacity, the will to persist in effort, to progress, to get back up, to continue, to fight for oneself and for one's team.
The group's reflection goes further than this first approach. This is the first part of that reflection. In the next article I'll share some of the keys offered by Mehdi and Yannick during the session, drawn from their rich experience in high-level basketball.
See you soon!
Frédéric
Working group
URB Brain Basket core team
- Pascal Thibaud, coach and technical director of URB
- Damien Leduc, URB management team
- Lucas Fontaine, player and captain of URB
- Claire Gully-Lhonoré, sport psychologist
Guests for the session:
- Yannick Bokolo, former French international
- Mehdi Mary, current coach of CSP Limoges
- Frédéric Damato, mental coach
