Dallas Ice Jets

“Train the brain and develop your mental toughness muscle.”

Most serious hockey players know the importance of cardiovascular training, strength training, and speed training. However, how many players make a point of incorporating training into their routines that focuses on mental toughness? Research clearly shows that positive thoughts, success images and ideal emotions strongly improve performance. Creating positive, impacting change starts with teaching players the importance of disciplining their thinking and not let their “head” prevent them from obtaining success.

Developing a psychological edge
The game of hockey places some tough demands on the mental capacities of the athlete. Today's player faces some unique challenges as the standards are higher and the competition is tougher. Top athletes consistently work on their physical game to reach new levels of performance and now must do the same by incorporating mental training into their overall game. More and more athletes recognize they can only go so far on physical abilities and that developing a psychological edge and readiness is one of the main tasks for preparing athletes for competition.

Mental training is a specific term used to describe the techniques designed to enhance mental and emotional control. Mental training for athletes often includes goal setting, visualization, mental imagery, self-talk retraining, emotion control and in general, ways to establish true ideal thoughts, images and emotions to enhance performance.

Mental training is designed with the purpose in mind to develop and build mental toughness, which translates into having a psychological edge that allows players to cope with the many demands - competition, training, lifestyle, expectations - that are placed on them as an athlete. Mental toughness allows players to perform more consistently and better than their opponents.

Conquering the battle of the mind
Mental training helps players overcome performance anxiety which is often referred to as “the battle of the mind,” a common problem experienced by young players. The athlete feels anxiety as the competition is approaching, or during specific times during the competition, that produces mistakes and errors in judgment. As an example, if there are certain thoughts that tend to cause nervousness, an experienced athlete will know what those thoughts are, be able to recognize them during competition, be able to get those thoughts out of the mind, and then replace with the proper thoughts. The result is an emotion more ideally suited to optimal performance. Mental skills have been developed specifically for this condition and to help players find their “zone,” which is the ideal feelings and emotions they feel during periods of high performance.

Mental skills and toughness training sessions
At the Ice Jets Hockey Academy we teach players the importance of mental training and how to utilize it to give them a winning edge over their competition and elevate their game performance. Our program offers players mental skills and toughness training sessions, which provides a very practical, easy-to-understand-and-apply mental skills and toughness training approach. The purpose is to equip the athlete with powerful, cutting-edge mental training and toughness drills and skills in a simplified, easy-access format that can be applied immediately. We believe that helping our players develop a mental edge over their opponents is just another opportunity for them to be victorious during competition.

Once we teach our players to recognize the need to begin the battle of the mind strategies, they can then welcome the positive, and consciously discard destructive thoughts. This allows them to take the first step toward developing the mental toughness that they need to be their best.

The Ice Jets Academy works consistently with players to develop some of the following sports psychology mental toughness skills:

• Staying relaxed under pressure, in what is often called a “good nervous”
• Focusing on what’s important and letting go of everything else
• Rebounding from mistakes, bad breaks and failures
• Handling last minute self-doubts and negative thinking
• Using mental rehearsal for upcoming performances
• Self-motivation by setting personally meaningful and compelling goals
• Recognizing mental traps and avoiding them
• Developing self-confidence and a positive, go-for-it attitude.