ZEPP FM 009 - Bouncing back from sport injuries with Dr Les Podlog

Maria Toorpakai is a Pakistani squash player who had the dream to become an athlete as a young girl. Unfortunately, the culture, the society and the Taliban don’t allow girls to be actively involved in sports in Pakistan – and especially not in remote tribal areas like Maria’s home, South Waziristan. However, Maria never gave up fighting for what was important to her, and luckily she had a father who was a strong advocate for equal rights of men and women, and supported Maria in her dream to become an athlete.

At the age of 4 years, Maria burned all her girls clothes and lived disguised as a boy, which made it possible for her to be the athlete she always wanted to be. After discovering squash and the joy she experienced on a squash court her true identity was revealed and she received death threats from different groups, including the Taliban. Although it wasn’t safe for her to leave the family’s house she kept training inside her bedroom. She sent thousands of emails to people around the world, asking for help. Finally, Jonathon Power, former world #1 in squash, offered her to come to Toronto/Canada. Today, Maria Toorpakai lives and trains in Toronto, still competing for the Pakistan.

In this episode, Maria talks about her story and her experiences as a girl in an extreme patriarchal society, about being oppressed, about receiving death threats and about never giving up. She talks about the mindset she developed on her journey in life in squash and sport, about equality, human rights and her book A different kind of daughter. We also talked about the Maria Toorpakai foundation is dedicated to building peaceful communities and gender equity by investing in education, sports and healthcare programs for young girls and boys in remote regions of the world, particularly the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

After studying psychology, Lisa focused specifically on the field of sport psychology, because she enjoys helping other athletes learn new things and improve their performances. Today she is living and working in The Hague in the Netherlands, owning ToughMinds together with two other sport psychologists, a company that delivers sport psychology services to athletes, team, coaches, companies as well as other target groups in the Netherlands.

Once you meet Lisa you feel the positive vibes that surround her and I really enjoyed talking with her. She doesn’t only talk about the great moments as a sport psychologist, but also shares several situations where she felt that she might have made a mistake, and that taught her some valuable lessons. In addition, Lisa and I talked about what skills future sport psychologists should learn in order to be really able to work with athletes, coaches and other clients, and not only focusing on the basic sport psychology skills everyone can learn in text- and work books.

Thank you, Lisa, for all the great insights into your methods, your ideas, your way of working with people and what lessons you already learned along your way as a sport psychologist.

Nick Symmonds is a two-time Olympian, who competed for the United States in the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games. With 7 NCAA titles, 9 U.S. titles, a silver medal at the World Championships and a personal best of 3:59.68 for One Mile, he can be pretty satisfied with what he achieved during his active career.

However, Nick doesn’t enjoy the good life after a successful sporting career, he goes on and sets new goals for himself for the future. Not only did he co-found RunGum, a company producing chewing gums with energy boosting ingredients, but he strives also to climb the seven summits within the next couple of years. His goal is to be the first person on earth to run the mile under four minutes and summit Mt. Everest.

In this episode, Nick talks about how he dealt with stress prior and during competitions, why discipline and dealing with obstacles is so important and what characteristics he developed while being an Olympic athlete that help him achieve his goals today in business and in mountains.

Thank you, Nick, for sharing your personal insights with us!

In this episode, Fabian gives great insights into the lives of eSports athletes, how they train, how they live and how he tries to improve not only their level of performance through the application of several methods from sport psychology, but also their mental and physical well-being through new diets, more physical activity and fresh air. Moreover, his job is to create a cohesive team that sticks together, out of a small group of individuals who are only used to play their game in front of their own screen, only for their own benefit. With what I know about Fabian and how he talks about it, I’m pretty sure he’s doing a remarkable job in Copenhagen, helping Origen and his athletes to dominate League of Legends in 2019.

Many students and people at workshops or keynotes regularly ask me about the methods and strategies I apply when working with people. With this solo episode today I am sharing one of the strategies with you, which I use for myself and which I apply with athletes and other clients when it’s all about defining new goals for the future. I’m taking you through the complete process of reflecting on the past, identifying lessons learned from the last year or the last season, define new goals for the future as well as strategies for the times when life gets difficult and you might lose your goals out of sight.

A couple of years ago I started not only defining goals for the upcoming year, but also developing a certain structure that not only helps me for myself and my personal goals, but that I can also apply when working with clients, athletes and students. The result is the SIX+ONE strategy I’m going to talk about in today’s episode. I will definitely keep working on the strategies and its methods, but maybe you and your clients can benefit from what the strategies is like today.

In order to make it even easier to follow and apply this strategy I created a short step-by-step guide. In this pdf file you get the basic guidelines, the strategies as well as one template for working on your outcome goals in step number 5. Should you have any questions regarding the strategy or any thoughts, please drop me an email and I’m happy to answer all of your questions!

Kevin Rempel is a 2014 Paralympic Bronze medalist, author of the book ‘Still Standing: When You Have Every Reason to Give Up, Keep Going’, and founder of the Sledge Hockey Experience. Kevin has an incredible story that has captivated audiences across Canada. He firmly believes that the greater the challenges you face, the greater your story will be, and as you discover the mindset that enables you to unlock your unknown greatness you begin to rewrite your script and be the hero of your own movie.

Back in the early 2000s Kevin was a motocross rider with a dream of competing at the X-Games. On a beautiful day in July in 2006 he jumped with his bike high through the air, lost control over his moto bike, crashed and severely injured his spinal cord, which left him an incomplete paraplegic. Now, sitting in a wheelchair Kevin was desperate to take responsibility for his own life and prove his doctors wrong, who told him that he will never be able to walk again. Kevin not only regained his ability to walk – and ride a moto bike again – he also started playing wheelchair basketball and sledge hockey, and finally competing at the 2014 Paralympic Games. 

In this episode, Kevin talks about his experiences after his accident, his mental health problems and suicidal thoughts, how he took responsibility and ownership of his life and his situation, bad recommendations he heard in the hospital, and what gratitude means to him today. I learned a lot from Kevin and how he approaches his life after being knocked down quite a few times.

Every year I’m reading many books to see what I can learn from them for me personally and for my work with students, athletes, coaches and other clients. A couple of years ago people started asking me which books I read, which books I can recommend, or which books I frequently give away as presents. After telling the same things over and over again, I founded my personal book club, where I review one book a month. The topics range from autobiographies, over leadership and motivation to Zen Buddhism.

Last year was the first year when I decided to choose the top books I read that year – and I wanted to continue this in 2018 as well. Thus, in this episode I’m reviewing the what I consider the five best books I read in 2018 and which I recommend to many of the athletes, coaches, students and clients I’m working with! However, I’m not only reviewing these books today, I’m also giving them away for free to one lucky winner.

The books I recommend in today’s episode are The obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday (3:27), Quiet by Susan Cain (15:44), Mindset by Carol S. Dweck (25:04), Wherever you go, there you are by Jon Kabat-Zinn (36:48), and The daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman (44:43). I’ve put the time stamps in brackets so you can easily navigate to the next book if you’re specifically interested in a certain book. I hope that you’ll benefit from these books as much as I did!

Still, one of the very few sport psychologists working in eSports is Ismael Pedraza from Colombia. After playing football himself he realized during his studies of sport sciences how important the mental side of the game is, and he started to specialize in the field of sport psychology. Although he never really played video or computer games himself, he identified a huge demand of mental preparation in eSports, what lead him and some colleagues to found The Mental Craft – a company devoted to help athletes, teams and coaches in eSports improve their performances through sport psychology.

Ismael has been working in eSports for the last three years, which is an amazingly long time, because sport psychology wasn’t really popular in eSports a couple of years ago. While working with Misfits, one of the professional teams in the European League of Legends Championship Series (EULCS), they became the first Western team to take any games off of the then reigning World Champion SK Telecom T1. If – like myself - you’re not familiar what eSports competitions look like, you can get a great insight in the following video. I think, it’s somehow really fascinating.

In this episode, Ismael talks about his experiences in eSports, how he entered eSports as a sport psychologist, and how he thinks athletes, teams and coaches in eSports can benefit from sport psychology. Moreover, he gives some great advice for any sport psychologist who thinks about learning more about eSports and what is really necessary to know about eSports and the different video games in order to be able to successfully work in eSports. One important aspect he mentioned here was, that it can be even beneficial not to know anything or too much about eSports, and how this “not knowing” can set you up for a successful career as a sport psychologist in eSports.

Only very recently I was invited to speak at the 8thEuropean Pole Vault and High Jump Conference in front of coaches and athletes about a topic that is truly important to me: coaching athletes. While preparing this presentation, I always had a statement by John Amaechi in mind, that illustrates why I think it’s so important to reflect about how we work with athletes.

John Amaechi said in his keynote presentation at the AASP 2018 conference in Toronto/ON a few weeks ago, that in sport we’re working in an environment that is not made for the benefit of the athlete. Unfortunately, I have to agree with him in many situations. This environment is not only shaped in influenced by sporting organizations and federations, but also by parents, advisors, and most importantly coaches. I’m not saying that everyone who is working in sports acts only for their own benefit and their own success and against the well-being and the needs of their athletes. However, I think and feel that we all can improve how we work with other people in general and with athletes in particular.

Thus, in this presentation I share some theories that might help coaches understand their own coaching as well as their athletes a little better. Moreover, I also talk about some evidence-based strategies from sport psychology research that coaches can use and apply when working with their athletes, and how coaches can implement these strategies into their coaching. I hope, wish, and believe that we all can improve how we work with other people and change the environment of sports for the better.

Matthias “Hauni” Haunholder is a professional freerider, and he is also an adventurer. Hauni competed on the Freeride World Tour between 2008 and 2011, finishing regularly among the Top 5 athletes and he started going on expeditions in 2008. He travels to Antarctica to search for powder snow, hikes through Siberia to climb the highest peak in Eastern Siberia and to be the first to ever drop into the face of Gora Pobeda, and who went to Onekotan – a hostile and remote island south of Kamchatka – to climb and ride a volcano.

I’ve seen his movies and I must admit that it’s absolutely stunning what Hauni does and I am so glad that he made some time available to talk about his motivation and his purpose, how he deals with stress atop of a mountain or during a ride and what he learnt during his career as a freerider. From my perspective, Hauni is an athlete who is able to teach each and everyone of us that nothing is impossible if we put in the work and hours that are necessary to make our dreams come true.

Hauni is a unique athlete who shows perfect self-awareness and which helps him achieve his goals and make his dreams come true. …and if you want to know how Hauni deals with standing on a 50cm wide ridge atop of a mountain and staying calm and relaxed at all times, this episode is definitely for you.