Word: slump
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...honest, have been pretty mediocre in terms of what I wanted to accomplish,” he says. “For some reason, I haven’t been able to put together a good season. Every year, it seems as if there’s a slump or two hitting-wise, and the season’s so short that one bad day starts to snowball.”***Salsgiver hasn’t done poorly, mind you.Last year, he hit .298 and was named second-team All-Ivy League, improving on a .287 junior campaign...
According to Johnson, achieving that peace is the key to avoiding a full-fledged slump. A slump?that downward spiral that only gets worse the harder you try?is familiar to even amateur athletes. For golfers, it can start with the yips, an uncontrollable twitch of the arm or an involuntary snap of the wrist at just the wrong moment. For a pitcher, it's the strike zone over home plate that suddenly begins to jump around. For the basketball player, it's the hoop that has inexplicably shrunk...
Athletes in the throes of a slump will swear that it came all of a sudden, out of nowhere. But psychologists say the episodes are less mysterious than they seem. They usually stem from a failure to prepare mentally for the pressure of athletic competition. "Training is about strengthening the mind-body connection," says Kirsten Peterson, sports psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee. "Athletes need to train their mind with the same discipline that they train their bodies...
What elevates any of those scenarios from an ordinary off day to a prolonged slump is the way the athlete interprets the dip. "It has less to do with what is contributing to the decrease in performance and more to do with how you react and adjust to the decline," says Jonathan Katz, a psychologist at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons...
...Michael Johnson, who competed in three Olympic Games over a span of a dozen years, avoiding a slump was mostly a matter of staying in control. "The first thing an athlete has to realize is that you are always in control," he says. "And you need to maintain that control." Control, that is, of both the body and the mind...