Sports Are Complex and Complicated, Yet Simple

Source: Josh Dick/Pixabay

Have you ever thought about how incredibly difficult it is to be an athlete? So many factors affect how well you can perform on the field, court, course, trail, hill, or what-have-you, whether in practice or competitions. And one small mistake or failure in any one of those many areas may result in a disappointing performance with little to no opportunity to turn the day around.

I actually see sports in three ways: as always complex, sometimes complicated, and, yes, in the end, quite simple. Let me explain.

Complex

Everyone who knows anything about sports knows that they are very complex activities with many contributors to sports development and competitive success and failure. Those factors that impact sports performance are both within and outside of athletes and, as a consequence, both within and outside of their control.

Environmental elements that can, depending on the outside sport, have an immense influence on how you perform in training and competitions include weather, venue conditions, and elevation. Cold, heat, wind, snow, rain, and lack of oxygen all make performing consistently well an incredibly difficult goal to achieve. The sheer variability of these external areas can cause the best preparations and efforts to end in failure. Frustratingly, none of these influences on performance are within your control. Ultimately, all you can do is adapt to this complexity the best you can.

Other external forces include people with whom you interact. Teammates; other competitors; coaches; officials; of course, parents; and social media (a big problem these days!) are more pieces of the “perform-your-best” puzzle that makes the puzzle more difficult to complete. Comparison with other athletes, overcoaching, and needing to publish positive posts on social media all add to the complexity of performing well consistently.

And don’t forget equipment. Many sports are highly dependent on the complex interplay of the various types of equipment that are necessary to perform a sport. This impact starts with testing and finding the right equipment for your individual capabilities and needs, continues with fine-tuning your chosen equipment, and concludes with competitive adjustments that optimize equipment performance.

Internal factors add even more to this complexity—physical conditioning, sport training, technique, tactics, sleep, nutrition, and, especially these days, tech use. For you to perform your best consistently, you must maximize all of these areas to get the most out of your physical capabilities.

And let’s not forget the mental side of sports. You need to train and strengthen your “mental muscles” (e.g., motivation, confidence, intensity, focus, and mindset). You also must have a well-stocked mental toolbox for when problems arise including goal setting, positive self-talk, mental imagery, practice and competitive routines, and breathing, to name a few. The interplay of all of these mental influences makes finding the ideal combination even more difficult.

Due to the very nature of sports, we can’t do anything to make them less complex. It is those very complexities that make participating in a sport so interesting, challenging, and, ultimately, fulfilling. All you can do is understand everything that is involved in making sports so complex and look for ways to manage them to the best of your ability.

Complicated

Unfortunately, too often, athletes (and coaches and parents) take sports beyond the realm of complexity and make them unnecessarily complicated. This new level of complication occurs entirely in the minds of those involved, and those who ultimately suffer from these complications are athletes themselves.

You have a tough enough time responding positively to the many obstacles that I described above that are outside of your control. It is entirely unfair and undermining that are you expected to also deal constructively with the obstacles that get erected in your minds by yourself, parents, coaches, and our destructive sport culture.

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These mental barriers include overinvestment in your sports participation (you want to care about your sport, but you don’t want to care too much), perfectionism, fear of failure (epidemic in our culture and the #1 reason athletes come to me, though they don’t know it’s the real cause of their mental challenges at the time), a preoccupation with results, expectations, and pressure. These obstacles conspire to do a massive mental whammy on you in the form of a loss of motivation, decline in confidence, worry, stress, anxiety, distraction, and a veritable tsunami of negative emotions including fear, frustration, anger, disappointment, hopelessness, sadness, and despair. When you add these ingredients to the already boiling cauldron of sports, you get a toxic stew that makes consistently good performances a near impossibility.

Simple

I apologize for painting such a depressing picture of what it takes to be successful as an athlete. But I will end on a very positive note. While accepting the unavoidable complexities of sports, your goal is to let go of the complications that get heaped upon you, not an easy task to be sure. In fact, I believe that freeing your mind of these psychological and emotional difficulties is the Holy Grail of sports participation and, in fact, a happy and successful life. Though beyond the scope of this article (much of my writing over these many decades has been devoted to showing athletes how they can drink from the Holy Grail, so please visit my blog to learn more), I can offer you a perspective that may help you focus on what’s important and, in doing so, remove the metaphorical weight vest that is laden with sports’ complexities and complications.

Despite everything I’ve written so far in this article, sports are actually quite simple. How’s that?, you may wonder. Well, because when you enter the field of play, regardless of your sport, you should have only one thought on your mind: Perform as well as you can! That’s it, that’s all, it’s that simple. You can call it bring it, full gas, full send, attack, charge, or what-have-you. Regardless, the message is the same: Clear your mind of all of the complexities and complications (i.e., crap!) and just give it everything you have and play your best from start to finish.

Of course, that singular focus is easier said than done for all of the reasons I’ve described above. At the same time, its simplicity is also its strength because the idea of just bringing it is easy to wrap your arms around and focus on, and it is easy to build a wall of simplicity around yourself as you enter the competitive arena that can shield you from the massive clutter that can overfill your brain until you feel like it will explode.

So, next time the complexities and complications of sport begin to take hold of you, remember how simple sport really is: Just give your best effort and perform as well as you can! Win or lose, you’ll feel good having given it your all. And if you continue to keep it simple and keep giving it your all, sooner or later, you’ll have a truly great performance, and the result will be very, very good.