ScotJos Update

With many restrictions in place in 2020 and lockdown to start 2021, ScotJos have used this opportunity to host a series of workshops (remotely). Recently we had a sports psychology presentation, Alban Dickson and Chris Hartley have done some work with us in the past (during the Scottish Spring weekend in Fife in April 2019). We felt it would be good to further expand the idea of sports psychology to the juniors as a way of helping them to improve their ability to handle stressful situations and critical races.

The presentation was very different to the previous session in many ways. Firstly it was totally digital and secondly it involved the juniors more, finally it was perhaps less directly sports related but more aimed at coping with stressful situations and accepting them as part of life’s journey. We take our responsibility for the hoslitic growth of the athletes within ScotJos very seriously and given the current circumstances this was a really useful session

Everyone was asked to draw a simple graph showing their commitment to sport versus time. The image is drawn by Chris Hartley who described his involvement in sport through mountain biking and then progressing to rowing.  This section was useful in showing the juniors that a sports career is unlikely to be a straight line of time V success. Indeed many studies show that those who experience failure at an early stage of their sporting journey develop further than those who have an easy start.  This is likely to be due to learning to develop ways of accepting failure as part of the learning process and using it as a way to relearn things and improve.

Secondly we did a slightly strange exercise where we initially took a quick mouthful of a drink and then after a short while were talked through a much monger process of holding the mug, thinking what it felt like, smelling the drink, tasting it, and eventually swallowing.  This was to try to develop the understanding of the difference of doing things unconsciously as opposed to thinking deeply about every little action and feeling. Slide 4

Finally Alban and Chris managed to introduce an aspect of orienteering with a compass 🙂 emphasises that at many occasions we can make a choice of what to do, whether to drift though something or to focus on it and really work at it.

The hour long presentation flew past and hopefully all those participating learnt something.

This session is the first in a series that we are holding over Zoom for ScotJOS members. We might not be able to train together in the forests but we can all learn about other aspects of performance in order to improve ourselves.

The next Zoom meeting will be a session on Nutrition for sport with a first part aimed at bringing the newcomers to ScotJOS up to speed with what was covered by session in 2019 and a second session aimed at a more workshop style session in order to get the juniors more active and thinking.

Many thanks for the engagement from everyone, Jon Musgrave (ScotJos Lead Coach)