Welcome to our latest Mental Health Blog.
This week, we’re focusing on a topic that resonates with many athletes: pre-game nerves. It’s a natural part of competitive sport and understanding it can empower both you and your sons.
Normalising Nerves: It’s Readiness, Not Weakness
In the crucible of elite sports, where outcomes can be decided in milliseconds, the complex interplay of psychological and physiological factors significantly influences a career’s trajectory. Anxiety is a complicated emotion that is a key part of elite sports. It’s characterised by feelings of apprehension, tension, and a heightened state of physiological arousal. For football players, pre-competition anxiety is a common and often inevitable phenomenon.
Instead of viewing these feelings as a negative, they can often be reframed as a sign of readiness. Research has even found a positive relationship between pre-game anxiety and athletic performance. This positive effect is particularly notable for experienced players, where even average levels of pre-game anxiety are positively associated with performance, and high pre-game anxiety predicts the strongest positive effect. This positive association also becomes more pronounced the longer players play in a respective game. Essentially, a certain level of “nerves” can indicate that your son is mentally and physically prepared to compete, and that their emotional control is part of the effort to achieve maximum performance.
Your role as a parent is crucial in shaping your son’s sport experiences. Open and positive communication between parents and athletes is vital for their development across various stages. Providing encouragement and tailoring feedback to your child’s emotional state, at the right time, is key to positively supporting their psychological and social development. This helps them understand that these feelings are normal and manageable.
Simple Breathing Exercises for Pre-Match Focus
One effective way to help your son regulate his emotional state and improve his focus is through simple relaxation techniques. These techniques are part of broader psychological training programmes designed to enhance athlete performance.
Here are two methods, along with a general breathing tip, that you can encourage your son to try before a match to help manage those nerves and channel them into productive energy:
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR):
What it is: This technique involves systematically tensing and then relaxing different muscle groups in the body. The goal is to help your son recognise the difference between tension and relaxation, enabling him to release physical tension caused by anxiety.
How to do it simply: Guide your son to lie down or sit comfortably. Ask him to deeply tense one muscle group (e.g., clench his fists) for about 5-10 seconds, then completely relax it for 20-30 seconds, noticing the difference in sensation. He can work through different muscle groups like arms, face, neck, shoulders, chest, stomach, legs, and feet.
Simple Slow, Voluntary Breathing:
What it is: This is a fundamental technique for mental regulation. Slow, voluntary breathing can significantly benefit athletes mentally by reducing stress and anxiety, thereby improving focus and concentration during training and competition.
How to do it simply: Encourage your son to sit quietly, place a hand on his stomach, and focus on slow, deep breaths. He can count to four as he breathes in through his nose, hold for a count of two, and then slowly exhale through his mouth for a count of six.
The emphasis is on lengthening the exhalation to activate the body’s relaxation response.
When introducing these exercises, remember that your approach is key. Choose a calm time, not moments of high stress. Encourage your son to try these techniques, but don’t force them. Allowing him to initiate conversations when he’s ready, even through texting, can be more effective. The aim is to equip him with tools he can use to manage his own emotional state, turning those pre-game jitters into a powerful readiness to perform.
We hope this information helps you and your sons navigate the exciting world of competitive football with greater understanding and confidence.