381 - The New Science of Mental Toughness with Steve Magness
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon and Human Performance Author & Coach Steve Magness discuss the importance of mental toughness in athletic performance and life. Magness emphasizes that mental toughness is not about ignoring pain but navigating it effectively. He highlights the need for a comprehensive approach, including sleep, nutrition, and ongoing education. Magness shares his journey from a high school athlete to a respected coach, stressing the importance of teaching psychological skills. He advises athletes to develop a mental toolkit, use self-talk, and focus strategies to manage discomfort. Magness also underscores the value of stress inoculation and the importance of putting oneself in challenging situations to build resilience. If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-2:12 Episode Promo
2:41-6:17 Introduction
6:23-end Meat & Potatoes
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TRANSCRIPT
Matt Dixon 00:00
Team. It's a special one in today's show, I welcome back a great friend, someone that I have the biggest respect for, Steve Magnus, we're going to talk about mental toughness. We're going to talk about managing pain. We're going to talk about the key aspect of performance, not just in sport, but in broader life. That's the mental game. And guess what, when you're a purple patch athlete, we do a lot of coaching in this being coached or being a part of a program to help you fuel your performance goes well beyond just a prescription of your training. It's important that you have a 360 degree focus on the athlete around all of the supporting habits, sleep, nutrition, hydration, recovery, etc, but also ongoing education, support, guidance, and ultimately coaching in the mental game. And so this is a wonderful time that if you're interested in becoming a part of purple patch, don't just get a plan. Don't just get a workout come and be a part of a program where we think about you performing at your best, not just in life and getting you faster, that's the easier part, but also to extend and helping you in broader life as well. If you'd like to reach out for a complementary needs assessment, we're going to go through all your goals, maybe revisit some of your challenges that have held you back in the past, and ensure that we create a blueprint for you, for you to go on and be successful. That complementary needs assessment, you can set it up. It is pressure free info@purplepatchfitness.com if we're a match, great, we'll help you get into the right program.
Matt Dixon 01:39
If we're not super you leave with some actionable steps to help you on your journey, and a good old handshake, maybe a high five, and wish you all the best. And so that's the crux of today's show. I will add as well. Don't miss the links to Steve's books. I'm going to highlight Steve's books today, and that's mastering the inside game. Very, very important, winning the inside game, that's his most recent book, and also do hard things. That's another one that I want to give a shout out for everybody in performance. I think you're going to love Steve madness. It's all in today's show. Have a good one. Cheers. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the purple patch podcast. The mission of purple patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 02:41
And welcome to the purple patch podcast. As ever, Matt Dixon and I couldn't be more excited. This is a cracker today, such a lot of fun and, of course, highly valuable content. About a week ago, I welcomed Steve Magnus to the purple patch Center in San Francisco, and the reason for that is he and I were welcomed to my son's school, Baxter school, San Domenico in Marin County in California. And we hosted a really fun, enjoyable fireside chat together, where we were talking about youth development in sport, talking about the role of sport and other features like that. And we thought, You know what, while we're here and while we're going to prepare for this fireside chat, of which, by the way, was recorded, so we're going to release that in as a podcast in the coming weeks. But while we're in San Francisco, we don't get to see each other too often. Why don't we set apart a little bit of sight to do today's show? Let's talk about a podcast on mental toughness. There couldn't be a better expert in the world to talk about mental toughness, pain, navigating discomfort, than what I would call the world master in this domain. If you don't know Steve Magnus. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He is a globally recognized expert on performance and wellbeing. He's the author of several books. I'm going to highlight. Two of them do hard things and winning the inside game. Very, very important. But it is his journey in sport, as an athlete, as a coach, as a performance expert, that I find so compelling. He actually started as a high school athlete. He ran 401, for the mile.
Matt Dixon 04:23
That was the fastest prep time in the nation at that time, and yet, he never improved on that mark. He never got faster, and that gave him an early lift. Experience with talent, pressure and certainly quite a lot of adversity. He went on to become a coach, coaching youth and collegiate athletes, before landing what many would call, at the time, a dream job, being a head assistant coach at the Nike Oregon project, and that is where he witnessed unethical and harmful practices. He made the courageous decision to blow the whistle, exposing. Hoping and terrible behavior at great personal and professional cost. Steve then went on out of that experience to build a reputation as one of the most respected collegiate coaches in the country, guiding athletes to national and Olympic success, all the while putting people first as human beings today. Is a best selling author. He's one of the leading thinkers globally on high performance, resilience and mental skills. And so who better is there? I ask you. We dig into mindset, mental toughness. Let's define what it is, and perhaps just as important what it isn't. We're going to discuss key com but concepts around pain and discomfort, and give you, the listener, a toolkit of practical tips how to build your mindset to be bulletproof when faced with discomfort, challenge and adversity. This is one you don't want to miss. Of course, we're going to add links to the books in the show notes. I really recommend you get a copy. It's going to be fun winning the inside game. It's a great one. I finished it a couple of months ago, just when it was released, and it is a terrific book for coaches, athletes and anyone that cares about performance. And so without further ado, I give you in today's podcast a conversation with Steve Magnus. You
Matt Dixon 06:24
and it is the meat and potatoes. And of course, we are joined by the one and only, Steve Magnus, Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Magness 06:32
Thanks so much for having me looking forward to this one. Welcome
Matt Dixon 06:35
back once again as well. It's been a long time since we since we've had you on the show and well, you've had about six books since the last time you were on here. I think so you are a master of performance, but we're going to dig in today around a subject that we both know a little bit about, suffering, pain, anxiety, stress, racing, pressure, and helping athletes and beyond navigate that. And as we talked about before you, you, you have, I think, been a a on the forefront of establishing, we'd almost say, a modern view and lens on how to navigate pain and suffering along this sign. So I want to talk about the subject of toughness and and we're going to dig right in so fast in your seat belt really tough, because I'm a harsh interviewer, but what would be in your lens, the biggest myth of the athletes believe around toughness?
Steve Magness 07:38
I think it's this. It's that we have this idea that toughness is about playing through the pain. It's about ignoring the emotions. It's about no crying in baseball, like pushing until we can't in. What that myth does is it gives us a single path, yeah, meaning we just go until potentially we break and what that that misses is that toughness is this complex understanding of it's navigating the thing. And sometimes that means, hey, I just got to go like there's no other choice. But sometimes that means popping your head above water and saying, is this goal still aligned with my values. Do I still need to make it at the top of the mountain, or am I striving for this at the expense of everything else I care about? So to me, we miss the nuance and understanding that it takes to navigate difficult challenges and navigate all the emotions and experiences and pain and fatigue that comes with it. And when we rely on a single, singular tool, we set ourselves up for going until that tool breaks, and then we're left with like, Oh God, what do we what do I do now?
Matt Dixon 08:53
I often and, and I want to align and see if your thing is a line. I often sort of use the analogy of the person going into a gymnasium with the rope and just hanging up to the top of the rope and hanging on and saying, that's toughness, right there. And in many ways, your expression is saying that is not what we're talking about.
Steve Magness 09:14
I think there's a difference between suffering for suffering sake, yeah, versus, to me, Toughness is aligning the Navigating of that suffering or challenge towards like the goal. There's a productive part of it. So when we line up to race, what do we care about? It's not, hey, I'm going to suffer the most and experience enough pain. No, this pain serves a purpose. It's I'm navigating this challenge to meet this goal. That could be an outcome goal, it could be a process goal, it could be anything like that. But there's a point to it. The idea, the kind of analogy I like to use is one that was taught to me by world class climbers. So people who climb like Mount Everest or Annapurna or whatever, and they said, you know, Steve, when. Climbing a mountain. You can see the top. You're like, this is what I've dedicated the last years of my life to getting to. The easiest thing in the world is be like blinders on, get to the top of the mountain. But in that moment, the tough decision isn't just push, push, push, regardless, is being able to say, okay, hold on. Take a moment. Do I have the energy and ability to make it to the top and all the way back down? Because if you look at the stats on climbing, like many of the accidents happen on the decent Yeah. So the tough decision in that moment is to sometimes be like, I don't. It's wonderful analogy I have that like the goal is pulling me, but I don't. And to me, it reframes toughness is it's about navigating these things to make the right decision. And sometimes that right decision is to push forward, but sometimes that right decision is say, hey, today's not the day I need to, like, you know, come back again another time, or shift my goal to something that again aligns with it. So when we see toughness as kind of this decision making framework, I think again, it gets to that complexity, that nuance that we all know as athletes, versus this old school model, which is like, hey, go hang on the rope until you can't and then you fall and hit your face onto the mat, and you say, look how tough I am.
Matt Dixon 11:23
Yeah, exactly. So I'm really interesting, because you've done expansive research on this as well. But a lot of this is fueled surely through your own personal journey. And perhaps you can separate this your journey as an athlete, and then, of course, your journey as an elite coach, going through youth, going through collegiate, going through ultimately, Olympic levels. So how much has that informed this perspective on toughness?
Steve Magness 11:50
I think our perspective informs everything. I mean, I was a victim of this old school mentality because as a as a high school athlete, I was like, you want to be tough, like, Go, envision Steve Fontaine and going, going until we bleed, right? It was tough, and that was it. But what I realized as an athlete is that at some point that stopped serving me, yep, meaning I had ability to push, and if I kept pushing, I got to point where I was over trained, where I was literally pushing myself into like, you know, physical and psychological distress. And it wasn't serving the ultimate goal of racing. And as a coach, what I realized early on is that we had this mistake where we think that, like you're born with it or not, yep, and that, you know, the way to do it is, like, I'm just gonna throw people into the fire and whoever survives, well, they're the tough
Matt Dixon 12:50
they're the tough ones. They're the ones that
Steve Magness 12:51
emerge, yeah. And what I realized is that, in the research, practices up, but as a coach, you realize, no, a lot of times we just haven't given these people the tools. And if I give them a tool set, lo and behold, the person who you know everyone else labeled, oh, that person's a head case of whatever. They're not going to be able to No, they can do it. They just were never taught to swim like if you take all that, all our kill our kids learning to swim. Sure, if you throw them all into the deep and some are gonna magically learn, yeah, but some are gonna think, and we don't go, oh poor Johnny, yeah, you just don't have the talent to swim. We say, oh no. Like, they got to learn how to swim. We got it. We've got to actually teach them the how to how to do it. Yeah? And the same is true with psychological skills. If we give people the tools, they're going to be tough.
Matt Dixon 13:45
Yep, it's, it's, I mean, it's one of those when we talk about sort of extending out to a broader perspective, and we think about common mindset traits that all high performers have, and you hear things like resilience and adaptability and overcoming challenge and failure, and all of these are not genetic traits. They're absolutely learnable, and you can develop them, but, but you're saying toughness is one of those as well. It's how different. It's a mindset trait,
Steve Magness 14:11
absolutely it is. It's one of those things that we can develop, and we we can look at whether it's sport, whether it's in life, or even research. In the military, they spent a lot of time looking at this, yeah, and what they found is that, hey, like, You're not born with it, yeah, we've got to teach and develop it. And in fact, in the military, this is one of the mistakes they made early on. So in the like 1950s coming off World War Two, they realized, oh gosh, we've got to create people who are more resilient, and what they learned is that, hey, we got to teach them. They changed their training to be not just like, hey, let's see who survives, but let's outline the characteristics the development, and it included not just throwing people into the crazy stuff that we see. In the military, but for but before they go into that, it's literally teaching them. It's there's like a 350 page manual on how to handle, like, the discomfort that you experience in the tools to utilize it. One of my favorite stats that I came across is that in the US, the largest employer of sports psychologists is the US military.
Matt Dixon 15:23
That's unbelievable. That's incredible. Yeah, in in we
Steve Magness 15:26
sit here and think like, oh, like these guys, they just must be boring and tough with it. It's like, no, they're spending time to develop it. And the message to the rest of us is, we can do that from a young age, or we can send the opposite message and say, like, Hey, you either got it or you not. And guess what that is. It's a stop sign for development. And I think for us coaches, is his permission to, like, not care about developing the person in front of us and almost giving us an out. Yeah, instead of being like, Nah, man, this kid just doesn't have the tools yet, I gotta actually teach them how to do it.
Matt Dixon 16:06
So I'm fascinated we sort of go into that of one of the things we talk at purple patch a lot about with our endurance athletes, is developing what I like to label the inner animal. Yeah, silly names for everything, almost. But, you know, a deep understanding of sensation and feeling, of how it feels, and the collision or competition that often occurs with that, with the metrics, the output. So you're looking, obviously, on the bike, power meters or running. You're looking at GPS, PACE meters, etc, heart rate, for an internal measure of cost. I'm interested in your perspective in athlete development. How important is it to help the athlete gain a really deep understanding or listening to the body as it relates to toughness?
Steve Magness 16:55
I mean, to me, it's one of the biggest things that we can look at. And the reason is simple, as we look at if we nerd out on the science of fatigue, what it tells us is those sensations are the signals to our brain that is deciding, like, whether we should slow down or duck into the porta potty and like escape the fatigue or what have you. Our brain is literally taking those sensations of effort, of fatigue, of our legs feeling like they're burning, of our breathing and saying, hey, this person needs to slow down because they cannot make it. So if our brain is literally utilizing those to decide, like essentially how far we can push, then does it not make sense to understand that language ourselves so that we can understand the different emotions and feelings. And the way I like to explain it is this, is that when you were a beginner athlete and I put you out on that track or on the bike, and I said, Hey, go do this hard exercise, the first moment you felt that sensation of fatigue, your brain goes like, Am I hurting myself? Am I injured like, panic, panic, panic. And what you learned over time is that no, like, the warning sign doesn't have to go off now, because, like, I expected this, I'm doing something relatively hard. Of course I'm going to feel like this. And what you realize as an expert athlete is you essentially get this, this granulation, meaning, when you've done it enough and you've listened to your body, you can distinguish, is this feeling, meaning I need to take an extra gel because I'm running out of fuel? Is this feeling an actual like, strain. My muscle is straining. I might be doing some damage. Is this just my mind saying, like, Hey, I'm doing something hard, and I'm just reminding you of that you slice and dice it apart. And actually, if we take it out of sport, what research tells us is that in all of life we experience this.
Steve Magness 18:58
So I have, I'm the parent of two young kids, and my wife is an elementary school educator, and for a long time she worked with kindergarten and first grade kids, and what she'll tell you is that kids throw tantrums, okay, and often in school, what happens is little Johnny or little Susie has something bad that happens to them, like they don't get picked for kickball, right? Or someone takes their crayon and they come running to teacher crying, and the teacher is like, what's wrong? And kids at a young age often have a low emotional granularity. What that means is they say, I'm I'm sad or I'm mad, right? As adults, we might say I'm frustrated. I feel left out, right? I feel like I don't belong. We have different descriptors, yep, and what research tells us is, because as adults, we have different ways to understand this complex thing. We can handle it better. When you're a kid, everything is either like, disaster, yeah or not, or Yeah, you know. And because you don't have that granularity, you can't deal with it. So if you go into a kindergarten class, often, what teachers are sitting there teaching their kids is like, okay, Johnny, this is the experience you had. It's okay to feel frustrated by this, but there's options to deal with this. We need to do the same thing as adults when we're handling fatigue, discomfort and effort. The more granularity, the more we can understand it and explain it, the better off we're going to handle it. Because guess what? The solution to sadness is hard to come across, but if I tell you I feel lonely, I have a solution. I go call Matt and get to hang out, and I feel that presence and that belonging. It's the same when we look at effort and fatigue. There's a solution tied to the experience was we have, if we have that granularity, we can understand it.
Matt Dixon 21:06
I'm interested in your perspective as a coach, and I'm going down a rabbit hole. I'll reverse this out of it a little bit, but I'm sure you have athletes that ask for this all the time and and as a coach, I I had it, which is, just tell me what to do. So I I want to just tell me the pace I want to run out. So I say I want you to run at a moderately strong effort, or I want you to be at a seven out of 10. No, no, I don't know what that is. And what I want is tell me to run a seven minute mile pace, or eight minute pace, that's it, or tell me to ride at 200 because that's specificity, by the way. So as it relates to this subject, why, in your opinion, is that the wrong approach?
Steve Magness 21:46
Because what it does is it makes you entirely reliant on external signals. You've essentially said, Forget this. I'm going to send it out elsewhere. And here's the analogy I like to use, okay, when you're driving your car and you're on the freeway and the speed limit is 70 miles an hour, are you constantly staring at the you know, speedometer in your car and be like, Oh, no, am I is am I 65 or 75 or 80? No, you have a feel for it, yeah, because you've driven long enough in your car where you understand what that is. And chances are, if you rent a car and you get a new car, at first, you're like, oh, this. I gotta understand how much to push and pull on that. Yeah. So you you pay attention to the little external until you got the feel. The same is true when we're looking at that our own internal odometer or speedometer of that feeling. Yeah, the better athletes. There's a scientific term for it. It's called interoception, which basically means, can we read our internal signals and translate that out into the external actions we're taking? If we're entirely dependent on that external we don't have that communication, and what ultimately that leads to is often poor performance because we've outsourced it all in. Let me give one more example to make this clear. Is that if you're running a marathon, okay, and you're hyped up on adrenaline, often what happens is like there's a disconnect between that internal and external marker, you know exactly. And if you get to mile one or two, and you look down and said, Oh, like my external measure tells me I'm at this pace and I'm in you know, I'm in trouble.
Steve Magness 23:35
If you listen to that, you might not have that breakthrough that you've had. I've experienced this. Sorry, I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole. I've experienced this when I was an athlete, when I was chasing the four minute mile mark. Okay, the four minute mile is the perfect example, because it's the simplest external metric. You run four laps, every lap is in under a minute, and you know, you're good, yep. Okay, there's so many races where I know I messed up, because I get to 800 and I'd or 1200 meters, and I'd see that clock, and it go from 159 to two flat to 201, and in my brain, because I knew it, if it wasn't 159 point something and it was two flat point something, my brain would go, Steve, you're slow, yep. Meanwhile, if I was just in the moment racing. I could have said, I feel great, and even though I'm a second soul, guess what? If you feel good, chances are you're going to be able to make it up at the end with a nice kick home. We all experience that. But if you're overly reliant on that external mark, it almost becomes the stop sign that tells you like, no, no, the goal is gone, even though logically you understand like the the difference between 259 and three flat is like that, and you can make it up in an instant.
Matt Dixon 24:53
It's so funny. I recently, about a year ago, I was consulting with with an athlete as a daughter of a friend. Of hours. And they had on the ERG a time trial that lasted about four minutes. And the coach was giving her very specific instructions on stroke count, exact pacing that she should hit to go 359, she was always so a very, very similar sort of structure. And I said, and she said, it's very, very strict, and you have to say this. And I said, Okay, great. Then the next time you do this, I want you to imagine that you're hosting a party, and what you're going to do is you're going to start with Frank Sinatra, and then you're going to move to the killers. You like the killers, yeah, great. And then you're going to move to some heavy metal, then you're going to finish with, like, a big dance party. And I said, you're going to build through and just go by rhythm. And she was like, You're completely bonkers. And she went, 354, and I said something that she would and I said, There's no way you can ever go 357 or 356, 354, if you're so bound by metrics, where, how does a breakthrough ever happen? And of course, what she was doing there is, if she was off by stroke, count off by exactly your experience. It became shackling. Yeah, it was
Steve Magness 26:05
so there was a great, there's a great story. I'm gonna mess it up a little bit. But Roger Banister, when he, when he ran the first sub four minute mile, okay? He was panicked, I think, like a lap or two in, he was panicked, worried about his pace fast enough. This is pace fast enough. And he reports in his autobiography, he heard a voice from his crowd, which ended up being his coach, Fran sample, which essentially, I forget exactly what he said, but he said essentially, like, relax and follow the pace and compete. Like, follow the Pacers. They had two teammates in that front of them. Just follow them and turn your brain off, is essentially what he's saying. And banister relaxed, stopped worrying about the pace, and just said, Hey, I'm following these guys. Like, be in it. And then when it comes time to kick the last lap, like, kick. Like, yeah, and he broke it. And if you look at whether it was banister or the other athlete going for it, John Landy before him, often, what happened is like they knew exactly what they had to do, and it became this surge of like stress, of like, am I going to do it? Am I on pace? Am I going to do it? And I think like that unlocking of like, Hey, forget about it, trust yourself, go with the rhythm and do the things that we practice, is that thing that often frees you up instead of having that external marker, which becomes this roadblock.
Matt Dixon 27:26
Yeah, that's fantastic. I want to dig into it's what I am going to do, as I promised I would, is I'm going to reverse this out of our rabbit hole. So we're coming back on the main freeway again. We're going to come back to pain and toughness a little bit. What do you see as athletes? Biggest Mistakes as and I'll say it as a mistakes when interpreting during flight, pain or fatigue.
Steve Magness 27:56
I think one of the biggest mistakes is when we see it as an enemy. Yeah, I love that. When it's something that we need to fight and resist, block out and block out. Yeah, in what happens there is, when you frame it like that, your brain goes like, Okay, this is something we don't want, yeah, so this is something that like, if it keeps increasing, I'm going to panic because it's a negative thing, yep. And instead, if we frame it as like, these are signals, right? This is information. This is something that is along for the ride, and I need to, like, accept and, yeah, it's going to kind of suck at some point. But like, I need to accept it and navigate it and use various tools, whether it's self talk or breathing or all the things that we know and think about is if we do that, it stops becoming the enemy and stops becoming the competitor that that you're fighting against, and your brain is almost like freed up to be like, okay, we can handle this. I mean, anyone in the world will tell you that. Like, if you or I were anxious before a thing, if I came up to you and said, like, Hey, Matt, just block it out. Yeah, exactly. It's not gonna work. You know, if someone comes up, you just gotta block it up out and just like, relax. Well, in the history of the world, I don't think it like telling anyone to just block it out and relax.
Matt Dixon 29:22
Ever work? Yeah, exactly. It's never had a positive ever.
Steve Magness 29:26
Your brain goes like, What do I look really stressed? I must look like, turn the dial to 11.
Matt Dixon 29:31
Yeah, exactly. By the way, if you are having a discussion with your partner and they're very angry, if you say, just relax, it will not give you the intended consequence.
Steve Magness 29:40
Exactly like we know this human nature we
Matt Dixon 29:43
have when, when it comes to pain, one of the things that we was talking about is welcome it to the party. In other words, like it is a, as you say, a signal. It's a it's a byproduct of doing something special. Quite often it's by necessary, like if we want to do anything to the. That is of great success, it is going to involve challenge, discomfort, and so this is a signal that you're actually in the midst of doing something
Steve Magness 30:08
in what you've what you've done there psychologically is you've switched your brain on to what we call an approach mindset, yep, meaning it's like, Okay, I'm gonna approach this with curiosity, instead of the avoidance mindset, which is like, push away, avoid hitting it in the water trap or whatever it is and in your brain often backfires when you get stuck in avoidance.
Matt Dixon 30:28
It's great. I want to talk a little bit about stress exposure and and start to move to some some practical side, some applicant applications for for the listeners, resilience, building stress exposure. What does the science tell us?
Steve Magness 30:48
Yeah, yeah. So what it tells us is, there's this whole scientific kind of field on what they call stress inoculation, which essentially is this, is that your brain almost has like an inner alarm, and the way to modulate that inner alarm is to go do something difficult and hard that increases or experiences some sort of stress, and then, if it's appropriate, your brain adapts to it. It's no long. It's no different than when we go train a muscle and make it stronger. Now the key is, just like when you're going to train is if I take you at Matt and I say, Okay, we're gonna do stress inoculation, and I take you to the Navy SEALs, you know, training, and said, Hey, have fun. Go at it. Your brain is probably gonna go, What in the hell is this? I'm checking out, right? It's gotta be the appropriate stress, right, where you have the tools to handle it. Yeah, and we've talked a lot about this so far, but the tools means, when I experience this, I'm going to try to utilize this strategy, meaning I'm going to try and change my self talk. I'm going to breathe into the thing instead of telling myself to relax. I'm going to shake out my arms, or whatever it is, to get that embodied feeling of like letting go of the tension. I'm going to think about, you know, talk to myself in third person, whatever it is.
Steve Magness 32:12
But you have strategies to manage the thing, and what research tells us is that the more you utilize these strategies like the better you are to you better you get at them. So the way I like to look at stress inoculation is, often, when we get into a workout, we have physical parameters that we're trying to hit. Yep, you're going 10, four, hundreds, seven out of 10, right? Or whatever it is, I like to frame it the same with with mental stuff. What tool are you working on today? Right? Are you gonna visualize yourself? Are you gonna do this? Are you changing your focus? Are you gonna be focused on the thing, or kind of zoning out and saying, Hey, I'm gonna go for a ride for a while, whatever it is, like, I think the hard workouts when we're going towards discomfort, we've got to have, like, a toolbox that we're developing in there as well.
Matt Dixon 33:08
What are some of the most simple tools or strategies that for someone listening, that they could try and put into play?
Steve Magness 33:15
So I think that one of the biggest ones is how we talk to ourselves. So there's all sorts of research that shows what's called a psychological distance, which is essentially, if we can the problem is, when we experience stress, it feels so personal and real, and that discomfort feels like it's it's like our brain almost tricks us to feel like this is the end of the world. Yeah, it's like, do or die. And what research tells us is, if we can create a little bit of space there, then we can start to see it as that information we talked about. So for instance, research tells us, if we start to talk to ourselves in second or third person, our brain kind of goes like, Oh, this isn't like, you know, the inner voice that is like Steve sounds like it's coming from a friend. So even if you change your voice to like, Hey, come on Steve, like you can do this, your brain goes like, oh, that's that's like Matt telling me this stuff.
Steve Magness 34:13
So I guess I'll listen to this. This creates a little bit of of dissonance. Another way to do that is to change your focus and attention again. Often what happens is in the moment, we focus on the stress. So if our legs feel heavy and tired or burning, all of our attention is on our legs, and what you need to do is say, Okay, I'm going to change my focus to make my brain realize that. Like, yeah, yeah, this matters, but there's all these other signals coming in too. So you could say, Hey, I'm gonna lock up. I'm gonna stare at the competitor in front of me. I'm gonna stare at the shoulder blades and look at that. That is my focus point. I'm gonna change my focus to not. I'm gonna make it the whole 26 point. Point two miles, which might feel overwhelming, but I'm just gonna get to the next aid station, and then I'll re evaluate right
Matt Dixon 35:08
so interestingly, I have a question as it comes for this, is there any research on your experience? Is this a personal choice? But let me build on your analogy. My I'm running along. I run like a donkey dipped in cement, as you know, and my legs are really hurting. Is there more value of me externally focusing on a project above? So the next stage station I'm going to go to, so that's a target, or I'm going to look at the shoulder blades, or is there a different type of value of me saying, You know what, I'm going to think about my arm carriage. So something internal, and I'm going to stay supple, and I'm going to keep my arm speed up. So something that's actually that's, it's a slightly different focus. Is there? Is there one that's better than the other? And so, yeah,
Steve Magness 35:58
so here's what research tells us is a long time ago. In the 1970s some psychologists studied the best marathoners in the US. So at the time, people like Frank, shorter, gold medalist, and what they found is that while those several rungs below tended to get locked on on one of those focus items, they just said, Okay, I'm going to focus on the next aid station. The best marathoners, like Frank Shorter, rotated, oh, they rotated, okay, meaning, for a certain period of the race, they'd be like, I'm going towards the aid station, or the next marker, or what have you. And then that would stop working as well. And then they'd be like,
Matt Dixon 36:37
okay, because the brain is smart. Hang on, you're trying to keep Yeah, but it's
Steve Magness 36:41
like, it's like, Okay, I'm gonna relax my arms and focus on this. Yeah. So the way, the way I like to interpret this, is like, yes, some are better than others at different points, and there's individuality of this. But the reality is, you want to be able to train and practice your mind to go to a bunch of different spots. You're developing a toolkit Exactly. Yeah, so that when push comes to shove, if your normal one that is so reliable and always works, just doesn't work. In that case, you don't go, Well, I'm screwed. Say, Okay, I'm just going to change the focus a little bit here. In the other part of this is, is what research tells us is that external markers towards, like, a goal of, like, next aid station, next turn, next mile marker. Work really well when it feels like we can make it there, yeah, but when it feels too overwhelming, when it feels too overwhelming, it doesn't that's That's fascinating.
Matt Dixon 37:36
There's also a thing that we talk a lot, and this this has particular reverence, some relevance in the run, for sure, but on the bike, because we have more tools available. You have gears, you have standing, they always talk about athletes of if you don't like the rhythm you're in, change the rhythm and and that's very simple, but that's empowering. So say, okay, so if you're riding at a certain pace or cadence or gear, or whatever it is, and then you can, you can shift it up. It's the same in the talk the mental toolkit, if you want to call it that, it's like, hang on. If this is not working, change it. But what you need to have is a developed toolkit that you can change too, you know, because if you haven't practiced it at all, and then hope is the only strategy, yeah.
Steve Magness 38:18
And so one of the things that I think is really important, and we know this is endurance athletes, is that often when we're in the middle of the pain cave, is that it feels like it's never gonna change? Yeah. But anyone who's done an Iron Man or a marathon or a long race can tell you you have good miles and you have bad miles, yep. And at some points you feel like, Oh God, this is disaster. And then the next mile you're like, wait a minute. Like, I feel pretty good, yeah. And what we know is that if you can utilize some of these tools to change that rhythm, it can get it can almost, like, it's almost like, nudging your brain out of it and saying, like, Wait a minute. This isn't for ever, like, we can get out of it. In running, we have a saying that is essentially, like, if it hurts a lot sometimes and you feel despair, sometimes, the best thing you can do is actually search, yeah, not for a long time, but like, 10 seconds. Like, because everyone can manage, like, Hey, I'm gonna pick it up for 10 seconds. And what often happens, not all the time, but often happens, was your brain goes like, oh, like, we're not dying. We don't need to walk. We just surge for a little bit. So I guess, I guess, guess we're kind of okay. And it's the same with our mental toolkit, as if we can just try something different for a little bit. It's like our brain goes, I guess we're not going to die out here like we can keep going.
Matt Dixon 39:44
It's It's fascinating. We I often talk to athletes before an Iron Man and say, Don't allow your brain to lead your body down a ditch. So in other words, and the other thing we say is, how you feel in any moment is no predictor of how you can feel in five minutes time. And. So, and that could be, by the way, when you're feeling great, you're still looking to carry on and do the things that are fueling that thing to help you, including fueling, by the way, and then if you're going through some form of catastrophe, that's when you bring on the toolkit to bring yourself out. But quite often, what athletes, often, unfortunately allow themselves to is it's bad, it's over. I've still got half a marathon to go. Oh my goodness me. My hopes and dreams are over, and the brain allowed follows, and the body just follows that straight down the into the trench.
Steve Magness 40:30
Basically, the way I like to look at it is, it's like that snowball coming down the mountain, yeah, right. Is like, you start catastrophizing, catastrophizing, and then eventually it's like, too big to go down exactly. And the way I look at it is, if you start to see that snowball roll, it's easier to intervene. Or, like, yep, you know. And I think, like, the brain falling following is such a good point, because, you know, we take this out of sport, and there's some really good research on this that shows that, for instance, if I'm doing a stressful event or something or speaking thing like that, is research tells us is, if I lean back and kind of slouch like my psychology changes. I start getting that avoidance, that fear I don't want to be here. But if I'm like animated and upright and engage. My psychology goes like, my brain goes like, hey, like, I guess this, I guess Steve wants to be here, like he's engaged on the thing. So the way I almost think of it is like, whether it's like physical or mental, we just need to stack the amount of signals sending to our brain that say, like, hey, I want to be here. I understand it's difficult, but like, I want to be here. This is what I want to do. Let's take on the challenge. Let's approach the thing and not avoid the thing. And if you keep sending those signals, eventually your brain's going to be like, Okay, I guess this idiot wants to keep going. Like, let's keep going.
Matt Dixon 41:56
I always I'm never going to let this down now that I'm going to say this on the podcast, but I often talk about this of a really stressful situation, where, if I have to go into a big stage, one of the things I do is go like, all right, what would Freddie Mercury do? Just be like Freddie and stand out and you just walk out and yet, but it's, it's a it's an image, it's a metaphor that strikes the tone of body language that is basically a kid in the brain
Steve Magness 42:21
and taking so I'm gonna give you research that validates this. There you go. So I'm Yeah, it's good. No, they call it the alter ego effect, okay? And they discovered this actually by looking at, you know, kids, so six, seven year olds. And they found that they when they told kids to essentially doing difficult things. They said, What would Batman do? Yep, they performed better and, like, had less anxiety because kids were like, Batman would do this. What would Freddie do? You know? And I think we all have that version of this. And, you know, I'm reminded of, I think it was the baseball player, Aaron judge, who, in her interview, talked about how when he goes on the baseball field, he doesn't think about, what would Aaron do? He says, I'm 99 which is his number. And to him, like 99 is a different person than Aaron judge, just a little bit. And 99 would do that. And I think it comes back to again, that, like, Alter Ego, or that psychological distance, where it gives us a person, where it's like, you know what, Matt might be a little bit afraid, but like, Freddie Mercury would do this. So like, let's go, have a day and let's go for it.
Matt Dixon 43:37
It's incredible. It's, I feel validated that it's such fascinating. So I'm going to wrap up with just a quick question, because you've, you've written on this subject extensively. I mean, you've got fantastic, you've got a fantastic book on this subject. But across all of your your books that you've written that there is always this, this element of toughness. You've, you've coached countless athletes through every level, from youth to that. You've, you've lived it as an athlete. If, if you were going to leave one insight for endurance athletes today and around mental toughness, this is your gift to the world, what would be your one insight around mental toughness.
Steve Magness 44:22
This is a hard question. My one insight would probably be to it's like cliche, but like, you just got to stick yourself in the arena. Oh, I love that in the reason is this is like the arena is like, can be devastating, because you can fail, you can you can experience heartbreak. We've all had those races where it just shows up. It come, you come a little short, but it also offers, like, this glorious opportunity where you feel it, you experience you get to look back and like, holy crap. I did that thing that a year ago I thought was impossible. And I think when it comes to developing toughness, half the battle is putting ourselves in positions where we might potentially fail. We might potentially, you know, not make it, but man, we took the shot, and that shot is what builds that lasting confidence over the time? Because we can reflect on it, and not just in sport, but you and I coming on this podcast, you and I, you know, standing up and giving a speech in front of everybody, can reflect on those moments and be like, You know what? I've been in similar spots, and I took a shot, let's freaking
Matt Dixon 45:40
girl, and that's how you build the resilience. That was your final word. And I'm still going to come back, because it's so it's one of the things, and I just want to, as two coaches here, one of the things I always talk to athletes about, and quite often reasonably close to their race, like a couple of days before the race and everything. And I often invite them to try and come up a level. And I always talk about the absolute beauty of the jeopardy of sport, and saying that one thing that's great about sport is that there's no guarantee so you can do and actually being comfortable with that and in a way, and whenever I first start talking about this, and I and encouraging the athlete to to think about, look, there is a very real opportunity that you can do everything right, and the outcome might not be great. And actually embracing that as a part of the beauty of sport can be, often be the catalyst and the grounding element to help them be successful.
Steve Magness 46:44
I love that. I mean, to me, it's like you're going on a quest. You're you've given this opportunity to explore not only your potential in sport, but kind of like who you are exactly and like that. That, to me, is the beauty of what sport, especially unbiased, but endurance sport allows you to do it.
Matt Dixon 47:04
Does it? Is it's endurance sport. Steve, thank you so much. I really appreciate being on the show, and we've got to prep and and we'll be sharing that podcast with it, with a rather big presentation tonight where we're going to be talking about kids and youth sport, which will be another episode that we'll release on here, but pain toughness, and of course, ever we'll leave all of the links in the show notes for for your your book and your books as well, but, but we're going to focus around toughness on this. So Steve, thank you so much
Steve Magness 47:35
for being on the show. Thanks so much. That was a blast. Good fun.
Matt Dixon 47:38
Cheers, guys. Thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the purple patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe, of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe, also share it with your friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have, let me know, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the purple patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the purple patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do, take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
mental toughness, pain management, performance, resilience, stress exposure, mindset, self-talk, interoception, fatigue, discomfort, goal setting, adaptability, endurance, coaching, athlete development