University of Guelph-Humber

When classes are out and Dr. Dan Yarmey isn’t teaching psychology at the University of Guelph-Humber, he’s putting his knowledge of sports psychology to work. Dr. Yarmey has trained the basketball and football teams at the University of Guelph to compete under pressure, and this summer he’s been working with a group of boxers who want to go pro. 

When did you start applying sports psychology to athletic training?

I’ve had a lifelong interest in sport as an athlete, but this started when, like a lot of parents, I was asked to help coach my children’s sports teams. From there, I coached high school football, got involved with the Guelph Gryphons, and soon had athletes asking for individual mental training. After that, I started getting contacted by parents of children with Olympic aspirations, asking me for training.

With the boxing though, I was contacted by Syd Vanderpool, who in 2004 was the #1 ranked middleweight boxer in the world. He’s now retired as a boxer, but has a health and fitness boxing gym in Kitchener and wanted me to give some advice and training to his boxers. Many of his boxers are just interested in fitness, but some are competitive athletes and others want to go pro.

How can psychology affect athletic performance? 

Every bodily action is preceded by thinking. Before you make any physical movement, there’s some kind of thinking, decision-making or problem-solving. If your thinking is in doubt, if you have hesitation or lack confidence, these are all mind-body problems, and if the mind isn’t fully prepared to compete, then the body is at a disadvantage.

Sports psychology works from the shoulders up. Whereas most sports scientists are concerned with action and physical movement, sports psychology wants to know how you perceive, focus, attend, and how you make decisions. You put that all together, and you have mental training.

What sort of training do you provide to boxers?

First of all, they have to decide the level of their commitment and how far they’re willing to go to improve. Many are just in it for fitness, but for those hoping to become elite, there’s a lot to cover. They have to understand goal setting and how to reach those goals, visualization, how to relax, how to regulate emotions and understand how emotions can help or hinder performance.

A lot of the training I do is with coaches before it’s with athletes. Coaches talk about being in control, bearing down and focusing, but most have never trained their athletes how to focus in the first place. I try to get the coaches to learn the positive principles of psychology so they can train better. With the athletes, I’m mostly giving them mental drills to take their movements from decisions to the autonomic stage, making them automatic.

You want them to react automatically, not make better decisions?

I want to train athletes so they don’t have to think too much. When you have too much thinking, you can seize up, so you need to train them to make decision-making fast, sure and confident. If you overthink, you can block, and that leads to your muscles shortening and tightening, your attention span narrows and you don’t see the wider peripheral field, hurting your focus. Together, it means that the flow and execution that athletes need to have won’t be there when they need them.

The way to minimize these effects is to learn to relax on demand. Relaxing will help your perception, giving you more time to process information. That’s basic cognitive psychology, and though it’s been used in sports for about 80 years, it’s only recently that it’s become common in training. All major athletes, whether they be golfers or tennis players, spend countless hours preparing themselves mentally to compete. Hockey goaltenders will often spend two or three hours on a game day visualizing and planning decisions before they hit the ice.

How does training for boxing differ than other sports?

I don’t really think it does. It’s cognitive skills and regulation of emotions, especially fear and anxiety. You’re dealing with confidence. Whether you’re a horseback rider or a downhill skier, it all comes down to how an individual processes information. The reason more top athletes fail isn’t that they lack strength, quickness or power, what separates them is mental preparation.

When you’re a boxer, you know that being hit in the face is part of the sport, so you prepare yourself to be the best defensive fighter you can be. You spend countless hours studying angles, learning stances, thinking about how to move your feet quickly, how to stop a blow and counterpunch. All of these skills are built on top of confidence and mental planning. 

Learn more about Psychology at the University of Guelph-Humber.