and athletes alike, its definition varies amongst them. A golfer may consider mental toughness to be the ability to focus while standing over a putt to win the tournament, while a boxer may view it as the ability to get up off the canvas to face more action after being dealt a punishing blow. A basketball player may consider mental toughness to be the desire to take the shot at the buzzer when the team is trailing by a point, while a quarterback in football may consider it his ability to execute a two-minute drive at the end of the big game. Examples abound, but so do the related questions: What is mental toughness? How do you get it? And why is it that athletes with comparable ability and training can speak to the value of being mentally tough, but differ greatly in their development and display of it? The answers to these questions are not easy to come by. Despite the frequent attention paid to the concept of mental toughness in sport, there is little agreement on how the term can be defined. This creates an inherent obstacle for all athletes seeking to enhance their performance in their given domain. There is an abundance of research and scientific inquiry on the design and implementation of physical skill training. Strength and conditioning programs are becoming routinely integrated into sports programs at levels ranging from professional to high school and even middle/elementary school programs. The benefits of such training are numerous, and include improved stability, flexibility, agility, speed, strength, and power (citation ?). All of which are known to have a positive impact on performance when trained and developed within the context of safe and appropriate programming (citation ?). Similarly, coaches frequently attend clinics and symposiums in order to both learn new skills and techniques to bring to their teams and athletes, and then also to teach and inform colleagues of their own skill training
and athletes alike, its definition varies amongst them. A golfer may consider mental toughness to be the ability to focus while standing over a putt to win the tournament, while a boxer may view it as the ability to get up off the canvas to face more action after being dealt a punishing blow. A basketball player may consider mental toughness to be the desire to take the shot at the buzzer when the team is trailing by a point, while a quarterback in football may consider it his ability to execute a two-minute drive at the end of the big game. Examples abound, but so do the related questions: What is mental toughness? How do you get it? And why is it that athletes with comparable ability and training can speak to the value of being mentally tough, but differ greatly in their development and display of it? The answers to these questions are not easy to come by. Despite the frequent attention paid to the concept of mental toughness in sport, there is little agreement on how the term can be defined. This creates an inherent obstacle for all athletes seeking to enhance their performance in their given domain. There is an abundance of research and scientific inquiry on the design and implementation of physical skill training. Strength and conditioning programs are becoming routinely integrated into sports programs at levels ranging from professional to high school and even middle/elementary school programs. The benefits of such training are numerous, and include improved stability, flexibility, agility, speed, strength, and power (citation ?). All of which are known to have a positive impact on performance when trained and developed within the context of safe and appropriate programming (citation ?). Similarly, coaches frequently attend clinics and symposiums in order to both learn new skills and techniques to bring to their teams and athletes, and then also to teach and inform colleagues of their own skill training