Gymnastics as a sport is one of the very few where there is always a real and present danger of physical injury. The fact of the matter is that as you progress up through the levels in this sport, the degree of skill difficulty rises and so also does your chances of sustaining an 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.

So what's the deal with all this fear? What's the cause? Sometimes a gymnast can't even clearly articulate what she's afraid of, why she's afraid or even if she's afraid. Sometimes that athlete has every good reason to be afraid. Perhaps she's a bad fall, broken a bone, bruised herself or had a near and very scary miss. Maybe she saw someone else get hurt. At times the fear is predictable, as the gymnast, moving up to the next level, now has to learn and master new and scarier tricks. However, there are times when there appears to be absolutely no logical reason for the fear. Maybe the gymnast has even been doing the skill for a year or two when suddenly, POOF! It's gone! She's afraid and no one, gymnast, coaches or parents can figure out exactly why.

The bottom line is, when unchecked, fear can spread like wildfire from first one skill to another, one event to the next until the gymnast is so ruled by fear that she can't even make it to the gym anymore. When not successfully worked through, a gymnast's fear can easily drive her out of the sport. So what's a gymnast to do? How can she successfully put fear in perspective and constructively use it as a marker of her successful progression from one level to the next? How can she overcome that pesky fear of moving backwards so she can start moving forward again?

There is one basic strategy for overcoming any fear. I present it here in it's simplistic form because this strategy is much easier said than done: You overcome fear by doing the thing that you fear the most, over and over again. The one thing that always feeds fear is avoidance. When you avoid a trick that you're afraid of, your imagination takes over and begins to exaggerate that fear in your mind's eye. The more avoidance, the larger that scary trick becomes in your mind. Of course, this then sets up a self-perpetuating, negative cycle. If something's scary you'll avoid it, but your avoidance only makes it that much scarier. So simply put, you overcome fear by moving towards, not away from it. Unfortunately for the more resistant fears, this strategy doesn't always work. Let me explain.

Sometimes you have a trick that is so scary to you, 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 even 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.

In fact, in these situations we can say that the fear is literally in your neurology and physiology. It is lodged in your brain and in your body. As a result, conscious encouragement, demands, threats and no amount of frustration will change things. In these situations what do you have to do to set yourself free from the grip of that nasty fear?

Last year I worked with a gymnast who had seriously injured herself doing a move on Bars. She was a dedicated Level 9 athlete with Elite aspirations and a desire to compete in college. No one worked as hard as her in the gym and very few of her teammates had her focus and desire. Because she had broken bones, it took her a number of months to recover from her injury. When she had been medically approved to go back, she was dogged by a fear that "it" was going to happen again. The fear followed her around the gym and wouldn't leave her alone. It spread from bars to floor and from floor to beam. She was left balking on skills that she used to easily do before the accident. Her frustration and impatience at being stuck seemed to be growing out of control. Most nights she'd come home from gym miserable and in tears. She couldn't get the fear out of the back of her mind. No matter how hard she tried, she was unable to will her body to just go for it.

Thankfully, this gymnast had a patient, caring coach who did not have her own ego tied up in her gymnast's performance. All too often, coaches internally measure their value and self-worth based on how well their gymnasts perform. When a gymnast gets bogged down on a particular skill because of fear, these kinds of coaches, after exhausting their repertoire of coaching interventions, will become impatient, demeaning and abusive. Why? Because they see the gymnast's inability to move beyond her fears as a critical failing on their own part. They inaccurately reason that if they were a better coach, they could get the athlete unstuck. This is NOT always the case. Bottom line here: A coach's frustration, anger and impatience directed towards the struggling gymnast does NOT help her get unstuck. It does absolutely nothing to help the situation. On the contrary! The gymnast's worry about disappointing the coach and falling from grace in the coach's mind only serve to get her more stuck and troubled. Most gymnasts need understanding and patience when they're struggling, not a hard blow from a two-by-four.

So how do you really work through fear? A good deal of very resistant fear has its' basis in trauma. That is, the gymnast has gotten hurt directly, had a near miss, scary fall or somehow had seen someone else get hurt. The trauma of this experience then stays stuck in that athlete's neurology and physiology. Here's how it works:

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 with a large store of white blood cells to fight infection, the clotting process begins almost immediately as the body attempt to heal itself), a similar mechanism exists for "digesting" psychological experiences in our life. That is, we have a "natural assimilation process" in which we try to make sense of 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, trauma of any kind, be it physical trauma such as an injury, emotional trauma from the abuse of a mean-spirited, demeaning coach or harsh, unforgiving parent, or the fear engendered by a scary miss or fall interrupts this natural assimilation process. As a result, the scary experience just sits there in our system "undigested."

When the gymnast thinks about the incident, she begins to actually relive it on some level. She sees and hears the same things, and begins to re-experience those same scary feelings in her body. In a sense, the gymnast has a mild case of PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a result, she complains that the fear seems to always be "in the back of my mind." In actuality, it is! Until this scary experience is "digested" that athlete will not be able to really get beyond her fear. The interesting and complicating piece here is that usually traumas build up, one upon another. Gymnasts are always falling and getting hurt in the gym. It's virtually impossible to learn and master a new skill without falling. While many of these falls are innocuous and quickly assimilated, some of them get added on to the trauma storehouse of experiences that remain "undigested."

Many gymnasts are even directly aware of the negative effect that these multiple traumas have on their performance. The effect goes on at an unconscious, bodily level. For example, when a humans being is confronted by danger, she has a built in instinctive physical response. She holds her arms out, palms laid back in a protective stance, she rises up and lean back on her heels. A similar protective response is visible when we are put in a position of falling. The arms extend out with wrists laid back to break the fall. Unfortunately, these built in, unconscious 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 of flip flop, flip flop and your body would literally go into this exact fear response. However, what will happen is that unconsciously your body will be calling up this protective reaction and in little ways it will make effective execution impossible.

Most recently I have had great success helping gymnasts get through these kinds of trauma-based fears with a process called Sports EMDR, (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). It's a therapeutic modality that makes use of the body's natural assimilation process to help the gymnast move through her incapacitating fear. The theory behind 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 then in the right, back and forth) frees up the natural assimilation process so that the gymnast's traumatic experience can then be completely processed through. Once processed through, the scary experience loses it's emotional and physical grip on the gymnast, leaves the her body and is no longer a driving force in her neurology. EMDR literally gets the experience out of the athlete's body and changes it in her neurology.

If you would like more information about how this process works and whether it might be effective for you or your child-athlete feel free to call me at (413) 549 1085

DR. G