Excellence in Sports: Training the Brian 

Physical fitness and good control over the ball do not make basketball players outstanding athletes. Excellent performance in games depends on training the brain and improving cognitive skills.

By: Ronni Cohen 

Basketball players and coaches often say that talent can not be taught, players either have it, or they do not. Its true, yet many talented players do not fulfill their potential. We often see how talented players get lost. To fulfill their potential, players must master their skills at a high level. These skills, which will be presented in the following, as opposed to talent, can indeed be taught, practiced, and improved upon.

Other than physical shape, athleticism, control over the ball, shooting skills etc, basketball players also need to processes information fast, sharp attention skills, plus good coordination skills - and the ability to do all this under pressure, or in other cases, to do all of this without any stress at all. Everybody knows there are players that perform well only when the entire game depends on them, only then do they wake up and begin to play well. These are the players who’s arousal reaches its optimal level and allows them to perform well only under pressure. Which is good, but it’s not enough. Opposed to them are the players who disappear in big games or under pressure. The performance of these two types of players depends too much on external stimuli. In both cases, the result is instable players. Players’ stability is critical, since it is the main component of a mental strength.    
 
Attention skills, planning, processing information and other cognitive skills are but a few of the elements that create players’ mental strength. Training cognitive skills combined with motor sensor practice carefully tailored to each athlete, can reduce to a minimum players dependency on external stimuli, and increase the ability to regulate and control themselves. Remember the rugby champion Phil de Glanville saying: “It is always easy to be focused and 'up' for the challenge when you are the underdogs, but the real art of professionalism comes from performing again and again when you are expected to succeed-that marks the true champions”

Cognitive skills

Some players are excellent shooters, have strong control over the ball and pass it well. But, when they have to do all of these actions simultaneously and think creatively, they fail to perform. In some cases, failure in performance is derived from the fact that they are not capable of coordinating between all the parts of the brain that are working simultaneously for a long period of time, or under pressure. Such synchronization skills between the different parts of the brain can be trained. According to John Ratey, a neuropsychiatrist from Harvard University, the more you train such high skills (planning, organizing, decision making), the more automatic they become.

Ratey also claims that, training one part of the brain is beneficial to other parts of the brain as well, which means different skills improve simultaneously. Ratey explains this approach by demonstrating how practicing different skills, such as language, memory, spatial skills, consecutive thinking and others, operate different parts of the same systems in the brain.

For example: when basketball players perform a drill that demands coordination, focusing visual attention, audio attention and concentration, while passing the ball and breaking the drill down to a sequence of organized steps in an ascending order, they are actually practicing sequence thinking, planning, visual memory and orientation in space, while working in a motor-sensing manner that requires simulations coordination between many areas in the brain. Performing all these activities together demands heightened attention and concentration skills. In other words, players are actually training their higher brain functions, neurological systems and the way they operate in the same manner they do during a game.

The principle is that if you know how neuro-cognitive systems work, you could train them to improve players skills.


Orientation and Disorientation

Sense of orientation, is what people feel when they recognizes their location as it relates to the space around them, it depends on seeing, hearing and sensing the environment.

When we talk about good orientation skills, we usually talk about general navigating in space. For example, imagine yourselves driving on the highway to a place you do not know. Naturally you will be more alert and aware of the environment. Maybe you will even prefer to turn off the radio. After you turned right and got on the ramp you immediately realize it is the wrong ramp. You will probably feel your heartbeat increase a little, and your lips dry. Breathing then becomes flat and slow, and if you take a look in the mirror you will see a dazed look in your eyes. You continue driving and suddenly discover from afar, but quite clearly the Empire State building that is familiar to you. Your first reaction will be a decrease in heartbeat, relaxed breathing and a focused look in your eyes again, because now even though you are not in the place you were supposed to be, you have an anchor in a space that helps you understand in which direction you need to go. The Empire State building is your orientation point in space, or in other words, the anchor that reactivated your ability to navigate in space.
The ability to maintain a sense of orientation is very important to basketball players during movement with the ball, while focusing on a shoot or a rebound. Fatigue, pressure or excitement during a game can damage players’ sense of orientation and appear as dry lips, a sense of internal uneasiness, and filmy eyes, just as it happened to the driver who took the wrong turn on the highway. In such cases players appear confused and unfocussed, since they lost their orientation. When a coach recognizes players in such a situation, he should give them a short break, hoping they will snap out of it.
However, giving players a rest magnifies their sense of stress and frustration and strengthens the state in which they are in. It’s preferable for the coach and players to perform a specific action that will retrieve players’ sense of orientation. First, coaches must direct players’ awareness to their own state of mind, and provide them with a solution in the form of a renewed anchor to navigate with in the game space. Anchoring orientation could be done by physical –motor exercise, simulation practice, self speech and more. It’s important to understand that players’ ability to be aware of themselves and to provide themselves immediate solutions strengthens their mental state and their sense of self control.         
Motivation and bad habits
Often players and coaches want to change players’ bad habits, however they usually do not succeed. Failed attempts at changing bad habits are usually believed to be a result of players’ resistance to change; coaches may then assume that it is the players’ motivation that is the problem. First, that is the nature of habits – it is very hard to change them and usually brings players and coaches back to undesired and familiar patterns. Second, if we understand the concept of motivation, we also understand that motivation allows a person to do what is in their power to do, and it does not allow players to do things that are out of their range of abilities. Motivation, as high as it can be, will especially prohibit players with attention difficulties to maintain attention during an entire game.
In most cases, players have the motivation to make changes, but they just do not have the ability. In other words: it is not that they do not want to, they just can not!” To a player, who’s attention has been hurt after ten minutes of physical and mental strain, bad habits are sure to reappear in exactly that moment of the game. This is a neurological condition that can not be affected directly by motivation. In these cases, motivation to continue and play (and the attempt to continue and concentrate) only makes things worse, since the rest of the game just decreases the players concentration and attention even more. The key to change is in improving initial concentration and attention skills and expanding the attention span by focused training. Only then, when players gain flexible performance skills, will they be able to change “bad habits”. At this point coaches and sports psychologists influence is most effective for to the awareness and guidance of players. The question of players’ motivation then disappears.

Motivation was always there, ability is what changed.

For example, during a game a player makes a mistake. The game continues. Now on court player is stuck recalling his mistake. The player can not stop these thoughts, not because he doesn’t want to, but because there is an electrical circuit in his brain that will not stop working. During this time the electrical energy that the player’s brain produces stimulates the reoccurring thoughts. The player is not concentrating on the game and is making more and more mistakes. He enters a state of disorientation that comes from a lack of effective self regulation. Now both player and coach are frustrated. At this point, after making his first mistake, would it be true to say that the player has no motivation to return to the game and continue playing? Hasn’t this happened to every talented player? Doesn’t it happen to players with very high motivation to help the team win as well? In these cases, neither talent nor motivation will help, only self awareness, regulating skills and highly developed personal attention skills. The players ability to go back to himself (in our terms: to regain a sense of orientation) and disconnect the pesky electrical circuit in his brain – will allow him to continue and play.  
The ways to gain self awareness and self control are many and diverse. They can be taught and improve performance by practice. Higher awareness is needed for the development of this entire field, which can lead to a change of priorities in the concept of professional training. For a change there is no need for high financial investments or new infrastructures, only the true aspiration for excellence as well players and coaches open mindedness.

Ronni Cohen developer of the “Raviv” program for excellence in sports