Today we have the pleasure to share with you our conversation with José Ángel Caperán, sports psycologist who works with both football coaches and football players of all ages and levels. Below you can read the full interview!
Sonrisa de Gol (SdG): ¿Could you please introduce yourself for our readers?
José Ángel Caperán (JAC): I am a sports psychologist, responsible of the course Experts in Sports Coaching and High Performance Psychology in Unisport Management School. Furthermore, I am cofounder of the online portal of psychological training futboldecabeza.com. I work, mainly, with coaches and football players from Spain and Latin America.
SdG: ¿What is the role of a sports psychologist?
JAC: Our main task is to coach/train sportsmen and sportswomen in the psychology of sports training, which is one of the main structures: technical, tactical, conditional, and psychological. Nevertheless, it is psychology the one where the others can link to. Hence, training psychology is fundamental wether if it is from a specific problem, and it is important to work it from early stages in a global and proactive manner within a multidisciplinar training.
Also, we work with coaches from a formation perspective continuously in their day to day as well as we give them tips about how to deal with specific aspects of their role such like their relationship with the media, the board, and their personal life.
SdG: It is said that the mind thinks with ideas rather than with information. Following this sentence, how must the coaches' feedback be towards his/her players? When a player makes a mistake, do we have to tell them how he/she should have done it?
JAC: Traditionally, coaches give by granted too many things and, as in a company, "what you don't say, it doesn't exist". To a player who makes a mistake, we must be very clear about what mistake the player has made, without any drama nor saturating the player with indformation that may distract them. Secondly, we must also tell them how important is that mistake as not all of them are equally important. Finally, what is the instruction to apply.
Unfortunately, the communication both on and off the pitch does not always fulfills these three fundamental requisites, making the player not to learn, feels lost, and even reaches a point of emotional block.
SdG: When results do not go the right way, it is common to say that players are not motivated. How can we bring this motivation back?
JAC: Many times we say the players are not motivated when, in reality, they are not oriented. In these cases, the objectives must face the process and not the final result: how do I need to act, comparing to myself, and setting the expectations with respect to the previous competition.
All the actions must go towards what we can control and using as a baseline our own recent successful experiences. We only ask the player to be a better version of himself than in the previous game, using a few actions that are under his total control. This is what we call "objective of realization". If the attention is focused on the result, without knowing how we will achieve it, we only focus more in that mental block and the player will say that he/she is not motivated anymore as a result of that lack of self-confidence.
Sdg: Anxiety is a quite common problem in several age groups. Why do you think that this happens? How do we need to act as coaches?
JAC: Competition is a very stressful situation and when the player reacts in a negative way this can lead to three types of response: rage, depression, or anxiety. From the three, the latter is the most frequent to appear and the easiest to work with. Anxiety is a form of fear, so the player fears whatever can happen. Anxiety is divided in three types of simultaneous responses (what I think, what I feel, and what I do): negative thoughts, muscle tension, and wrong actions. Sports psychologists work with sportsmen and coaches so that they can deal with anxiety developing protocols before and during its apparition. Basically, dealing with anxiety consists in: remembering recen successful experiences, control of muscle tension and respiration, and developing objectives of realization.
SdG: We can see in several interviews how professional football players say they don't really know how they have done specific technical gestures. How does decision making work in football?
JAC: Usually, decision making is based on the previous most recent experience and the brain takes it as the main reference ("the brain does not invent, it always takes previous information"). If the action is successful the player usually reaches that state of positivisness, but if the experience is negative, the player can get stuck.
We must do an exhaustive and individual analysis (which is usually not made) of those decisions made by the player in a football game.
SdG: Coaches have the tendency to base our trainign sessions in technio-tactical aspects also including the conditional structure. But, what psychological aspects must be considered in our training sessions?
JAC: Both technique and tactics have a psychological aspect that must be worked. To work on the technical aspect, we must promote the neuromuscular work and psicomotor coordination, which is basic to train visualization and imagination. Visualizing is not easy at all and it also requires of an exhaustive training in order to be effective. 99% of sportsmen do not do it properly and this aspect is fundamental, as it is the "software" of the plays that the brain transmits to the body.
Also, tactical work requires an analysis of decision making in competitions. Will we use a conservative or a more aggresive criterion? Will we follow that criterion until the end irrespectively of what happens? Why do we decide to go for ones and not the others? What is the role of the player in that moment? How must the player influence his/her teammates if things go wrong? What are previous experiences useful for?
Something that has always caught my attention is the after-match analysis, which usually takes place in a group environment where the coach transmits a valoration to the team and the players barely intervene.
For instance, the 80% of the players who get in touch with me is because they do not play and they feel lost as the coach always says things like "keep working like this, your opportunity will come". But this is a comment that does not transmit neither confidence nor motivation.
It is the players who look for the psychology professionals to obtain individual analyses and specific objectives. Obviously, the sports psychologist make an analysis from their area of expertise, but this factor, the psychological, is the one ruling the others. Hence, the influence of this work will always be notorious.
SdG: What is the importance of emotions in decision making? How can we train them?
JAC: Negative emotions like fear, sadness, or annoyment lead to muscle tension (affecting technique and physical condition) and provoke a lack of attention (which affects physiology and tactics) as we are focusing the attention towards what "we don't want to happen" or what "we don't want this to happen again" and losing the focus of the action that we must perform in a correct manner.
First of all, we must train the player to identify what they feel. It is not the same to be upset ("because I am not in the starting eleven"), than feeling lazy ("now I need to fight for a place I always had granted"), than regret ("I shouldn't have changed clubs"). We must identify what we feel and with what intensity, as there are nearly 70 emotions and we must identify which one is the most intense in a specific moment.
If the most intense emotion is negative we must train the cognitive part (thinking) so that the player knows if it is something rational (real, for instance, I am sad because a relative has passed away) or irrational (exaggerated, for instance, I hate my coach because I am not in the starting lineup). This will allow the player to reach a more efficient reasoning process to redirect their thinking and acting. The sports psychologist must help the player to perform this "racionalization of negative thoughts". Furthermore, within the psychological sports coaching we learn how to control the physical effect of negative emotions in muscle tension and respiration.
Comments