I recently stumbled across an article titled “It is like an endless guilt trip” – Greco-Roman wrestlers’ willingness to train and compete with pain and/or injuries. This article interviewed seven elite Greco-Roman wrestlers about how the culture of wrestling interacts with pain as well as their own individual experience dealing with pain in an elite grappling environment.
This article brought to some interest thoughts that I’m excited to share. Before I do I just want to admit that I have some clear biases in the writing of this article. While I’m nowhere remotely close to an elite Greco-Roman wrestler I have spent a large portion of my life involved in combat sports. Not only as an athlete (I wrestled, competed in judo, and I’m currently a brown belt in jiu jitsu) but also as a strength and conditioning coach who works currently with elite grapplers.
In addition to that I work with lots of folks in tactical and first responder communities whose mindsets have clear overlap with those presented by the wrestlers interviewed in the study.
The discussion and conclusions from the study are helpful but I think I can offer some unique takeaways I had that I want share. Before we get to that here's the at a glance bullet points for the study. Click the link above to read the whole thing for yourself.
Study Snapshot
Title & Citation Challenging the need for psychological skills training: Narrative identities of elite athletes with and without training Martin, L. J., & Zakrajsek, R. A. (2024). International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/17479541251350672
Core Question
How do elite athletes construct meaning around pain, and how does this meaning-making influence their competitive decision-making, particularly in relation to psychological skills training?
Who & How (Methods)
Participants: 8 elite athletes (4 with PST, 4 without)
Method: Narrative interviews analyzed via dialogic narrative analysis
Design: Comparative, qualitative exploration of how PST shapes athlete identity and coping
Pain and injury are viewed and experienced through a specific cultural lens. This culture normalizes risk and pain and effected athlete identity both during and after competitive careers. Despite these characteristics athletes highlighted the need for quality of life after sport.
What They Found (Key Findings)
Pain and injury are viewed and experienced through a specific cultural lens. This culture normalizes risk and pain and effected athlete identity both during and after competitive careers. Despite these characteristics athletes highlighted the need for quality of life after sport.
My Take
Having worked with these kinds of athletes—and also with those in tactical fields with very analogous temperaments—I have some ideas about how to address these kinds of issues, whether in competitive athletics or in livelihoods with high levels of inherent risk of bodily harm or even death.
Part of Me
First, some of this lack of risk aversion and acceptance of pain and discomfort is inherent to these individuals. These types of activities self-select for those who are compatible with the tacit demands of dangerous environments. An interesting example: if you look at what type of athletes pass BUD/S (Navy SEAL selection) training most frequently, it’s wrestlers. No random coincidence there, I’m sure.
With that in mind, it’s essential to know that to be successful in combat sports, combat, or other dangerous environments, risk and pain tolerance are not only necessary—they are often rewarded with success.
In my view, the questions to be asked are not whether or not individuals should play; it’s how much does playing cost, and is it worth it?
Which brings me to another portion of the overall point I’m making here. Do the athletes have a good framework for determining training and competition costs that allows them to make informed decisions about their own health? If you’re an expert in sport medicine or human performance, please know that it’s your primary job to help athletes make sense of their experience and the information that’s available to them. I call this calibrating perception.
Sweat
Secondly, one particular thing that stuck out to me in this paper was how the athletes reported tension between how the performance or skill coaches represented training and what the medical team recommended. This provides an opportunity for me to discuss some general practices that at worst harm athletes and at best limit athlete performance longevity.
Coaches and medical staff—get your shit together. The well-being of the athletes in your care is your number one priority. Coaches—it’s a given that everybody wants to win. Do you think NASCAR races with flat tires? They don’t. Get your athletes fixed if you’re not already. Med staff—not every incident is an injury. Sports are dangerous. Help those in your charge get back to their job; don’t sit on things to guarantee longevity in yours. Also, don’t just talk to each other—listen to each other. Skill coaches, HP, and medical all have unique points of view that can help. If you want to see how the best in the world manage this in elite athletics, check out the ALTIS Performance Trinity.
Another point to be made here is that thinking of therapy and training as distinct, separate, and hierarchical creates an athlete perspective that admitting injury or needing “regressive” help means they’re doing less and will be ill-prepared to perform. This could not be further from the truth.
Return to play is a continuum. It’s all training. If you present the work that’s being done in a therapeutic setting as training, it’s far more likely athletes will engage. This change in culture isn’t just through words in a muster or posters on a wall. It’s putting therapists and medical professionals in the same physical space as “training.” It means athletes who are returning from incident or injury aren’t sequestered away from their teammates like a jury in a murder case.
While subtle things like this may not seem directly related to whether or not athletes/performers report pain and injury, they are. If those who wrap their identity around being a high-performing member of a team are pulled away from their peer group because they can’t perform, that won’t be a psychological deterrent from reporting? You bet your ass it will. It would be for me.
This means we have to find ways to culturally and spatially demonstrate that reporting pain and injury is normal and that when done in a timely fashion, it can prevent further exacerbation of performance limitations. Further, if athletes do speak up, they won’t be incidentally punished for reporting by being removed from their routine and support network. In doing so they’ll be far more likely to ask for help before things reach a critical mass of dysfunction.
Mantra
In sports and careers where risk acceptance is temperamentally selected and to some degree culturally encouraged, a more robust system must be in place to create normalcy around reporting injurious pain. Not just by telling athletes it’s okay with words, but by constructing an environment where they aren’t segregated and can see a clear path toward what they care about.
Lastly, it’s essential that solution sets presented to athletes during return to play are relevant to the things they care about. They need to see and experience how what they’re doing forms a pathway back to what they care about—winning.
If the providers who are in leadership roles can see the forest for the trees then we can preserve the necessary toughness of those in our care and maybe even reserve something for after the battles are won.
Thanks for reading,
Rob
My book Check Engine Light is out! It’s all about how to preserve performance longevity!