Mental Blocks And Mental Strength

With the conclusion of the Tokyo Olympics, the sport of gymnastics will fade from the spotlight. But the young girls who commit their lives to this sport, like I did, will still be thinking about it day in and day out.

I was born a gymnast, flipping around the yard, hanging upside down on the swing set at age three, and giving my mom heart attacks. She had no choice but to enroll me in gymnastics. Competitive gymnastics is not a sport you can do casually.

As soon as I fell into it, it became my life. I trained 5 days a week, 5 hours a day, year-round, for eleven years. But the long grueling hours, hands ripped, muscles sore and injuries always popping up was never the hard part of the sport. At least not for me. My battles were always mental.

The mental side of gymnastics was brought to the forefront during this Summer Olympic Games. This occurred when the absolute best athlete to ever grace the sport, Simone Biles, became unable to perform her skills amidst the competition. Since most people understand so little of the sport, what happened to Biles was put into terms that others could relate to, like Pressure and Mental Illness.

Biles was admired for making the “choice” to pull herself out of the competition in order not to compromise her mental state and safety. But I don’t think she really had a choice. Her mental state made the choice for her.

She could not have done her routines. She’d been robbed of the very choice to do so, robbed by the strange workings of the mind.

I in no way want to diminish the importance of understanding mental illness, of understanding how extreme pressure can impact us mentally, or of promoting the message that it takes strength not to compromise one’s mental state to “win.” These things are all true and important.

However, when it comes to the sport of gymnastics, there is so much that is not discussed. Mental blocks are one of the sport’s defining features. Now, at last, they’ve been presented on the world’s stage.

Fear and mental blocks, in gymnastics, are two different things. Fear is something that I think most of us are familiar with. It’s a strong emotional response to something that you think is dangerous or likely to cause pain.

Logically, most things that gymnasts do cause them fear until they get used to them. When trying a skill for the first time, like a double back flip on floor for example, I would be terribly afraid. My heart raced, body shook, breath was short.

I’d run, tumble, pull for dear life, and land relieved. Elation would take over for having conquered the fear. The next turn would be slightly less scary.

A mental block, on the other hand, has less to do with fear and more to do with a loss of mental control. It is a psychological obstacle.

Much more difficult, sometimes even impossible, to overcome. Mental blocks came on, for me, in all different ways. Sometimes they came about because of a scary fall on a particular skill, or an upcoming qualifying competition that I was nervous about.

More often they came seemingly out of nowhere. I was totally fine, I had done my beam series (two or more connected flipping skills in a row) thousands of times, and then suddenly, I stood there on the four inches of leather, and I just couldn’t move. My mind no longer trusted my body.

My body could no longer be controlled by my mind. Sometimes the block would last a few turns, more often it lasted weeks or months. Some blocks lasted forever.

My freshman year of college, my mental blocks took over to the point that almost all the higher level skills I had learned so diligently over my 11 years of training, were gone. I couldn’t twist, I couldn’t release the bar, I couldn’t even run down the vault runway.

Just staring at the pieces of gymnastics equipment filled me with anxiety. I had to step away from the sport and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Even though I had never fostered hopes of reaching the Olympics (very statistically improbable) or even of getting a full college scholarship, I still wasn’t ready to give up the sport that I loved. I cried in my dorm room. My heart ached like I was losing the love of my life, and I was.

Soon after, I became a coach. As a coach, I vowed never to give up on athletes like myself, who faced blocks at every turn and tried so hard to overcome them. That turned out to be no easy task.

I have now been coaching competitive gymnastics for twenty years and have seen gymnasts face mental blocks more debilitating than any injury (and I’ve seen my fair share of those too.) I coached a gymnast who would scratch her legs raw trying to go for her flip on the beam. A gymnast who would stand in a corner on the floor crying for hours, refusing to leave until she made herself do one tumbling pass.

I saw blocks come from school trouble, home trouble, too much pressure, or seemingly out of thin air. Mental blocks that would spread through a group so that suddenly all the athletes were falling randomly out of the sky and landing on their necks.

I had gymnasts try hypnosis, visualization techniques, yoga breathing, taking breaks, private lessons, anything we could think of. Some of it helped, some of it didn’t.

I always felt so badly when I couldn’t help a young athlete achieve her goals. I thought back to my years in the sport, my terrible disappointment at my own failures.

When I saw Simone Biles compete her vault in the Team Finals, lose her air awareness and land shocked and disappointed, it all came flooding back to me. That feeling of flying through the air with no control.

The second before hitting the ground would stretch on forever. A free fall. Then the ground would arrive unexpectedly, no time to brace for the crash. I’d land on my back or side or worst case right on my head.

“The twisties,” as Biles and many other gymnasts call it, is just one of the many types of mental blocks that a gymnast can come up against. To me the twisties felt almost like passing out mid-air, I knew I was up there but I had no idea where I was or how I would get down.

When I landed, the tears would come instantly. Because I knew that I was in for months of mental anguish.

Watching the best female gymnast ever come up with a mental block in the Olympic games gave me a perspective I never had before. If it could happen to Biles, it could happen to anyone.

I had suffered through so many practices in tears. My coaches would kick me off an event for “baulking,” which means backing out of a skill at the last minute, a very dangerous thing to do.

I would hang my head, defeated, thinking, if I really wanted it, I could do it. If I had only tried harder, focused more, been braver, had better technique… But it wasn’t the truth.

I wanted it. So badly. So did all of the gymnasts I coached, whose blocks got the better of them. Thanks to Biles, I can finally see clearly that it was never my fault, not as a coach or an athlete. That I wasn’t a failure after all.

Simone Biles didn’t come home with the gold medals that the media had promised us, but instead she left as a different kind of hero. What was so heroic was how Biles handled this terrible blow.

She smiled, stood proud, and cheered her teammates on. What was truly heroic was that she wasn’t crying her eyes out, stomping her feet, having a total breakdown, (like I imagine I may have been in her shoes,) knowing that all the work she had put in over the past 5 years since the last Olympics wouldn’t end with going out and showing off her skills, which are undoubtedly the best in the world.

She turned heartbreak into strength, all with the cameras in her face.

Experiencing mental blocks in gymnastics has made me empathetic to all types of mental issues. To truly feel that you cannot get your mind to control your body in the way that you want, is an eye-opening experience.

To experience irrational thought and to be unable to do away with it, to want something so badly but not to be able to achieve it. The way a mentally ill personal wants to get better.

The way an addict wants to get clean. The way an Olympic athlete wants to show their hard work to world. But can’t. There is no explanation for it all except that the brain is beautiful, fickle, and mysterious.

Across the world there are girls ages 6, 12, 17, who are standing at the end of a vault runway rocking back and forth. They are trying to visualize a skill they did hundreds of times, but they can’t see it, can’t feel it, can’t get themselves to run, spring, flip and fly.

Their coaches and teammates are cheering them on. And they want to be brave, but they simply can’t do today what they could do yesterday. They are running to the bathroom and crying.

They are going home and setting goals. They are trying to overcome. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t, but I can see now that it doesn’t matter.

The sport of gymnastics makes you a warrior, and at a very young age. Perhaps that is the whole point of it. For we need to be warriors in this life full of challenges.

The sport also provides a huge dosage of humility, for even if we are the best one day, we can “fail” and lose our way.

I don’t wish the heartbreak of the sport of gymnastics on my own daughter, but I do wish her the perseverance, dedication, mental and physical strength, and compassion, which it has taught me, taught all the young women who have taken it into their hearts.