BREAKTHROUGHS IN OVERCOMING FEARS
AND BLOCKS IN THE GYM


Janice was a talented and hard working athlete with dreams of some day earning a college scholarship. She was totally passionate about gymnastics and committed to going as far as she possibly could in the sport. Towards this end, the 16 year old made the most of team practices and rarely wasted time chitchatting, endlessly chalking up or hanging out in the bathroom like some of her other teammates. Just like most gymnasts her age, Janice had had her share of fears as she progressed through the ranks but none of them ever derailed her for very long. The fact of the matter was that Janice was far too strong willed to let some little old fears get in her way. Sure there was that time in Level 7 when she balked on tick tocks on beam. Then she ran into an annoying fear of back giants the next year at Level 8. But eventually, like every other obstacle that she faced, Janice was able to overcome these fears. It wasn’t until the accident in the beginning of the next competitive season that she really felt the potentially career ending effects of incapacitating fear.

She was doing straddle backs on bars during team practice and feeling pretty good about herself. It was her very first day of working on them without the resi-mat and her first turn was flawless. Although the second one was a bit shaky, Janice was still able to recover enough to pull it off. It was on her next one when things suddenly went very wrong. As she swung to high bar she noticed that something didn’t feel quite right. Instantly she heard a cautionary voice in her head warning her, “don’t go!” At that point she instinctively made a decision not to do her giant. As she casted over and began to fall she realized that she had much too much swing. She couldn’t stop her momentum and went flying over the bar, completely missing her hands. As a reflexive, self-protective measure, Janice extended both of her arms out and braced for the fall.

The landing was horrific and brought the entire gym to a hushed standstill. It put an early and disturbing end to a season that had started so full of hope. Upon impact Janice dislocated both of her elbows and broke her right arm in three places. The painful break required extensive surgery to repair. For a while there was a serious question as to whether Janice would ever be able to do gymnastics again. It would take a good 9 months and long, painful hours of rehab before she was physically able to get herself back into the gym. Little did Janice realize that psychologically and emotionally her pain and heartache were just beginning.

As you can imagine, when Janice was finally given the go-ahead to return to the gym without medical restrictions she was immediately plagued by fears. She was definitely “gun shy” on bars and her fears and tentativeness seemed to spread to beam and anything that involved going backwards. However, given her determination to reach her goals and sheer tenacity, she slowly began to make inroads on these fears. To the delight of her coaches and parents, five months after Janice’s return to the gym, her fears had considerably diminished and she was once again going for everything. She was finally starting to feel like her old self again.

In mid-December, on the eve of the competitive season, Janice was doing a double full on floor, inexplicably stopped in the middle of her round-off and landed hard on her back. Although she only had the wind knocked out of her, the fall left her badly shaken and frightened. It was the last time she attempted a double full for a very long time. Just a few days later she had a nightmare in which she relived a version of her bars accident.

She was doing a front tumbling pass on floor, fighting with a little voice in her head cautioning her not to go, when a beginner ran out onto the floor directly crossing her path. In the dream she quickly jumped to the side to avoid the collision. She extended both arms out to brace herself for the landing and upon impact, broke both of her arms. She woke up from the dream with a start, terrified and shaking. It took her nearly 45 minutes to calm herself down and fall back asleep. However, when she finally did fall asleep, the nightmare continued. She was now on beam doing the second back handspring of a back handspring, back handspring combination when she missed both of her hands. Before her head hit the beam she awoke with a start and couldn’t feel her toes. They were numb. Janice lay in bed, heart pounding, confused and in shock. It took her several seconds to realize that what had just happened was only a dream. However, she was far too frightened to go back to sleep that night.

The vivid nightmares opened up the floodgates on her fears. All the doubts and trepidations that she had worked so hard to overcome since the accident came rushing back into her consciousness in overwhelming force. She felt totally freaked out. When she went to the gym the next day she was too terrified to attempt anything. Her fears had instantaneously spread to skills in every event and there was very little she could do without feeling completely panicked. She left practice early, totally discouraged and in tears. The next day wasn’t much better and ended the same way. Her panic was exacerbated by the closeness of the competitive meet schedule. How was she going to be able to compete feeling this way? How could she possibly reach her goals this season? She tried to steel herself to be strong and just go for things but another part of her wasn’t budging an inch! She could no longer just simply force herself to throw things like she had in the past.

Janice’s fears soon got so bad that she was even having trouble just getting herself to the gym. After a week of incapacitating fear, Janice was frantic and beside herself. Her coaches didn’t have a clue as to what to do for her. They couldn’t even get her to do basic lead-ups on the tricks that she was afraid of. They were totally stumped. What used to bring her such joy and pleasure was now a source of unbridled pain and frustration. She couldn’t concentrate in school because her mind wouldn’t stop thinking about gymnastics and her inability to get beyond her fears. Her frustration was getting completely out of control. She stopped eating and was having trouble sleeping. She became depressed and seemed to spend a lot of time crying. Hopelessness set in and for the very first time in her life, Janice entertained thoughts of quitting the sport.

THE NATURALNESS OF FEAR IN GYMNASTICS

Janice’s story is far more common than not in gymnastics. As a sport, gymnastics is one of the very few where fear is an integral part of the process of participation. The fear can be traced to two inherent elements: First, in most everything you do, you’re asking your body to do the unnatural and defy gravity. The human organism was not made to throw itself backwards or forwards, twisting and flipping in space. As a consequence, there is a certain amount of fear that is naturally stirred up in the process of trying to overcome the gravitational pull. Second, in gymnastics there is always a very real and present danger of physical injury. The fact of the matter is that as the gymnast progresses up through the levels in this sport, the degree of skill difficulty rises and with it, so does the chances of sustaining a serious injury.

As a consequence, fear is almost a constant companion for the competitive gymnast. Whether it’s a fear of a release move, going backwards on floor or beam, a new vault or a dismount, I know of no other factor in this sport that can kill an athlete’s joy, drive a coach to distraction and totally confound the athlete’s parents than fear. Fear also carries with it the power to completely traumatize a gymnast and stop her dead in her tracks. Fear is probably the number one reason why talented athletes prematurely cut short their gymnastics career. There is nothing that saps the confidence and dampens the motivation in a gymnast quite like fear.

Unfortunately most coaches are not equipped to effectively handle the psychological and emotional ramifications of fear. Let’s face it: For the average coach, a gymnast’s fear is an unwelcome obstruction to the natural learning process in the gym. Oh sure, most coaches will tell you that fear is pretty normal and that you have to help the athlete through her fears. However, their attitude towards the gymnast who is totally immobilized by what they consider to be an “irrational” fear speaks otherwise. Why? Fear disrupts the coach’s program. It literally slows down progress. It’s a time and energy drain that most coaches feel they can’t afford to put up with. Persistent fears in a gymnast exhaust a coach’s teaching bag of tricks and ultimately make that coach feel inadequate, incompetent and ineffective on some level. The problem with the stuck gymnast is that she won’t let the coach do his or her job. It’s these inner feelings of inadequacy that then lead to anger and frustration, which in turn may cause the coach to say and do things which further embarrass the gymnast, making her feel even worse. As a consequence, not only is the gymnast traumatized by her fear, but also she’s further traumatized by the coach’s reaction to her inability to get beyond it.

CAUSES OF FEAR IN THE GYM

When you look at the more obvious causes of a gymnast’s fears and balking, there are many. Sometimes the gymnast’s fears represent what I call “good reality testing.” That is, the athlete may have broken a bone or sustained a serious injury the last time she was on beam. Perhaps she saw a close friend or teammate get really hurt on a release move on bars. Maybe she got lost in the middle of a double back on floor, landed on her head and, although she didn’t sustain any serious injury, she really scared herself. Sometimes the fear is a product of a natural change in center of gravity and disrupted spatial awareness as the gymnast’s body goes through the physical changes of puberty. Along these same lines, fear can also emerge as the athlete’s emotional and psychological make-up develops and changes with maturation. Younger gymnasts tend to be more fearless because they literally don’t know any better. However, as the young gymnast’s brain and thinking processes develop, she begins to gain a greater awareness of the inherent danger of the skills she’s attempting.

There are times that fear and balking are natural responses to outside pressures from parents and coaches. It’s not at all that uncommon for a gymnast who is pushed too much to develop incapacitating fears. Fear can also be a healthy warning sign that the gymnast does not have the spatial awareness, physical skills or body flexibility necessary to safely execute a skill. When a gymnast is not ready for a trick, fear is the natural internal warning response. Fear can also be a simple product of having to learn new and more difficult tricks. Sometimes a fearless gymnast who has progressed rapidly up the ranks develops incapacitating fears because of the “too much, too soon” phenomenon. If an athlete doesn’t have enough time for the skills to psychologically and physically “set” in her neuro-physiology before learning newer, more difficult ones, then fear can result.

However, what confounds most coaches, parents and gymnasts are the many times when there appears to be absolutely no logical reason for the fear. Maybe the gymnast has been effortlessly and flawlessly doing a skill for a year or two when suddenly, for no apparent reason, it’s gone! She’s afraid and no one, gymnast, coaches or parents can figure out exactly why or do anything to get her unstuck.

The bottom line is, when unchecked, fear can spread like wildfire from one skill to another, one event to the next until the gymnast is so ruled by fear that she can’t even do the most basic skills anymore. When not successfully worked through, these fears can prematurely drive the athlete out of the sport. An additional concern for many coaches is that fear, like the flu, seems to be somewhat “catchy” in the gym. That is, it’s not at all unusual for one gymnast’s fears and balking to trigger similar responses in her teammates.

MOVING TOWARDS FEARS IS EASIER SAID THAN DONE

So just how does a gymnast work through her fears? What’s a coach supposed to do when he has one or more athletes that seem paralyzed for no obvious reasons?

On a more superficial level, there is one basic strategy for overcoming any fear: Do the thing that you are afraid of the most, over and over again and that fear will diminish. The one behavioral strategy that always feeds fear is avoidance. When you avoid a trick or event that you’re afraid of, your imagination takes over and begins to exaggerate that fear in your mind’s eye. Naturally the larger the fear gets, the more there is the tendency to avoid it. Thus avoidance sets in motion an escalating cycle of ever increasing fear. Intellectually understanding how this fear cycle works is not enough by itself to put a stop to it. Knowing that you have to move towards your fears does not make the reality of actually doing so any easier. Similarly, a coach or parent telling a fearful gymnast that she has no reason to be afraid is also information that is useless to her because it does not in any real way diminish the fear.

In fact, sometimes you have a trick that is so scary to you that no amount of conscious “moving towards it” seems to help. You try to convince yourself that you can do it. You try to reassure yourself that you’ll be safe. You may have been able to do this skill for months or even years. However, it doesn’t matter what your coaches, you or your parents say, you still can’t seem to get yourself to go. For some reason, the fear seems to always be in the back of your mind stopping you.

In these situations we can say that the fear is literally stuck in the gymnast’s neurology and physiology. It is lodged in her brain and body, and no amount of conscious mental toughness techniques, encouragement, demands, threats, frustration or temper tantrums will significantly change things.

Over the past 20 years of doing performance work, too many of these fear-based blocks have resisted all my best efforts. As a sports psychologist, I have always prided myself on effectively helping athletes overcome fears and blocks, bust out of slumps and perform to their potential. Several years ago I even had a book published based on my techniques and experiences getting the stuck, unstuck. I have done extensive work in this sport, and while I have had a fair amount of success with gymnasts, l’ve always been left feeling like I was missing something important. Why? I just kept on running into too many fears and blocks that I couldn’t seem to dislodge with my array of concentration, relaxation, self-hypnosis, imagery and cognitive techniques. Furthermore, some of the athletes that I had helped overcome one incapacitating fear on beam, for example, re-experienced that very same difficulty a year later or instead, came down with another, even more resistant fear on beam or a different apparatus.

BREAKTHROUGHS IN BREAKING THROUGH FEARS & BLOCKS

The lack of staying power of my techniques with certain gymnasts left me searching for the pieces to the puzzle that I was missing. There had to be a way to more powerfully deal with these incapacitating fears and blocks in the gym. Last year I found the missing pieces that I was seeking at a workshop run by Dr. David Grand, a Long Island psychologist and EMDR trainer who specializes in working with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), performance problems and performance enhancement. Dr. Grand is doing pioneering work in the field of performance psychology and helped me discover what I had been inadvertently ignoring all these years: Like all sports psychologists who work with fears and blocks today, I was just scratching at the surface of the problem. I was trying to work with the symptoms of the fear on a superficial level instead of with the underlying causes and where the fear resided in the athlete’s mind and body on a deeper level. In this way I was very much like a gardener pulling out weeds but leaving the roots still intact. In no time at all, the entire nuisance plant would grow back.

What most sports psychologists, coaches and parents don’t understand is that resistant fears and performance blocks have their basis in physical and/or psychological trauma, (negative experiences), of one form or another. Physical trauma can be something as simple as getting lost in the middle of a skill and landing hard, but without injury on your back, experiencing a scary near-miss, or it can be as serious as Janice’s injuries and involve broken bones, torn ligaments or damaged cartilage. The interesting thing is that the physical trauma underlying a fear does not even have to be confined to the gym. Accidents and injuries outside the gym can also have a significant impact on what goes on in the gym. Furthermore, the physical trauma underlying a fear doesn’t have to be that recent. Psychological trauma can include witnessing another gymnast getting hurt, being embarrassed or humiliated by a coach or parent, or being forced to do a skill when you’re not physically or emotionally prepared.

The negative effect of these traumatic experiences, however long in the past they may have occurred, becomes stuck in that athlete’s neurology and physiology and directly affects their ability to feel safe and comfortably execute in the present. It’s not at all unusual to have a number of related traumatic experiences fueling a fear or block. Whether the gymnast is consciously aware of the trauma behind the block is irrelevant. In fact, more often times than not, the gymnast may have consciously forgotten about that troubling event. All she may be consciously aware of is her fear and an inability to get herself to throw a skill. Here’s how it works:

THE NATURAL ASSIMILATION PROCESS

Just as the human body has a natural, built in mechanism for physical healing, (when we’re cut, blood flow increases to the site of the wound along with an increase of white blood cells to fight infection, the clotting process begins almost immediately as the body attempts to heal itself), a similar mechanism exists for “digesting” and integrating psychological and emotional experiences into our lives. That is, we have what’s called a “natural assimilation process” in which we try to make sense of our experiences, sort out the good and integrate it, eliminate the bad, both of which then allows us to move on in our life in a healthy way.

However, negative experiences or trauma of any kind, whether they’re physical or emotional, interrupt this natural assimilation process. As a result, the scary experience just sits there in our system in it’s “undigested,” original form. The gymnast doesn’t even have to be consciously aware of the particular negative experience for it to have an effect on her. However, when she does think about it, for example, while she’s waiting in line for her turn or lying in bed the night before a practice, she may be overwhelmed with the “what if’s,” (“what if it happens again?” “What if I get lost in the middle?” “what if I miss my feet and land on my head?”).

Sometimes the trauma is so powerful that the athlete actually begins to emotionally and physically relive the entire experience. This “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder experience, (PTSD), is exactly what happened to Janice in and after her nightmares. She re-experienced those same scary feelings and emotions in her mind and body.

A gymnast’s fears are not always so clearly connected to a scary experience. More often times than not the athlete complains about her fear as being something that’s “stuck in the back of my mind” that she can’t seem to shake free. In actuality, this is exactly the case. The memories are lodged in her mind and the associated feelings are stuck in her body. In this way the athlete‘s mind and body still maintains a vivid memory of the trauma.

Until this scary experience is fully “digested” or “assimilated,” the athlete will not be able to truly get beyond her fears, stop balking and begin to execute the way that she is physically capable of. The complicating piece here is that usually traumas build up, one on top of another. The fact of the matter is that in this sport, gymnasts are always falling and getting hurt. It’s virtually impossible to learn and master a new skill without falling or getting banged up a little. While many of these falls are innocuous and quickly assimilated, some of them get added onto the trauma storehouse of experiences that remain “undigested” in that athlete’s mind and body.

Along these lines, it’s also very important for coaches and parents to understand that what they think should or shouldn’t be considered a traumatic experience for the athlete is totally irrelevant. Trauma is very much a unique, personal experience. What an adult, from the outside looking in may assess as a harmless experience, may be tremendously upsetting to the child going through it.

FEAR IN THE BODY

Most gymnasts are all too painfully aware of the paralyzing physical experience of fear in their body. This experience is comprised of the various components of the “flight or fight” response: Adrenalin pumps into the system; muscles begin to tighten; heart rate and blood pressure go up; breathing becomes progressively faster and more shallow; digestion shuts down and the hands and feet become cold as blood is diverted away from the extremities to the deeper muscle groups. As a consequence of these physiological changes the athlete may begin to feel sick to her stomach and physically shaky as she stands there trying to will her body to “just go.” Shallow breathing contributes to a dizzy feeling and the lack of adequate oxygen further fuels her anxiety. Tight muscles and increased anxiety contribute to feelings of numbness and tingling in her hands, arms and legs. Of course the end product of all of these physiological changes is a young athlete in the grip of paralysis who no longer has control over her body and no access to appropriate muscle memory cues.

Few gymnasts however are aware of the unconscious physical responses to fear that are automatically triggered in their body from their past negative experiences. It’s these subtle, physical responses that make safe, proper execution even more impossible. Let me give you an example. Janice’s serious accident on bars involved her straightening both arms, with her palms laid back as she braced for the impact of the fall. This defensive, reflexive position of arms out, wrists laid back is just part of an instinctive response within the human being when directly confronted by an approaching attacker. Not only do the arms extend out, palms laid back in a protective stance, but the individual also rises up and leans back on her heels.
These instinctive, protective responses are frequently the exact opposite of what you may want your body to do in order to execute a skill safely and effectively. It’s not as if you’d be in the middle of a back giant or round off flip flop, flip flop and your body would literally go into this exact fear response. Instead, your body would unconsciously call up aspects of this protective reaction and in subtle ways this reaction would compete with the muscle movements required for effective execution. The end result of this inner conflict between different muscle movements is unwanted physical tension and disrupted performance.

GETTING FEAR & TRAUMA OUT OF THE BODY WITH SPORTS EMDR AND THE GRAND SYSTEM EMDR, (Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a therapeutic modality that makes use of the body’s natural assimilation process to help an individual process through and release the physical and emotional aftereffects of trauma and negative experiences. EMDR was originally developed to help those suffering from severe traumatic experiences (car accidents, combat, rape, serious abuse, etc.) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Dr. Grand has taken his knowledge of EMDR and integrated it into his own unique way of working with other kinds of trauma including those that underlie most performance fears and blocks. The result is his Grand System, a form of SPORTS EMDR that goes far beyond the effectiveness of today’s sports psychologists working with fears in the gym. Why? Because sports psychology typically does not deal with the root cause behind fears and balking, nor does it really get to the physical and emotional sites of the problem within the athlete. In short, sports psychology rarely deals with the underlying trauma in a way that releases it.

The theory behind Sports EMDR is that “bilateral stimulation” of the brain, (either moving your eyes back and forth left to right; alternating physical touch on the left side of the body and then the right; or listening to alternating sounds first in the left ear and then in the right, back and forth), when combined with specific images, emotions and physical sensations in the gymnast’s body, frees up the natural assimilation process so that the gymnast’s traumatic experiences that underlie the fears and balking can then be completely processed through. Once processed through, the scary experience loses it’s emotional and physical grip on the gymnast, literally leaving the athlete’s mind and body. As a consequence, the trauma and its’ related experiences are no longer a driving force in her neurology and physiology. The gymnast is no longer plagued by lingering fears that “it” might happen again. In the process she loses the body memory of the trauma, freeing her up to be able to execute the way she did prior to her performance difficulties.

Not only do Sports EMDR and the Grand System help get the experience out of the athlete’s mind and body, but in the process, it serves as a model for performance enhancement. It helps make that gymnast better, mentally tougher, more relaxed and confident than she was before. In 20 years of more traditional performance work, I would never have been able to take a gymnast like Janice and get her to the point where she is right now as a result of Sports EMDR: Back in the gym, happy, confident, relaxed and progressing through her Level 9 skills without any debilitating fears or lingering after-effects from her accident or the other, related earlier traumas that were consciously and unconsciously fueling her fears.

Sports EMDR is a critical, pioneering tool and a must for any sports psychologist working with today’s gymnast. Understanding how negative experiences and trauma get stored in the gymnast’s mind and body, and their role in balking will also help gymnastics coaches maintain their patience and a more positive perspective when working with the stuck athlete.