After missing the gold medal in the gymnastics men's team competition at the Tokyo Olympics, Zou Jingyuan came up with a procedural participation strategy prepared before the competition and adjusted his mentality according to the strategic prompts. On the penultimate competition day of gymnastics, teammate Liu Yang finally won the first gold medal for the team at the Tokyo Olympics. At this point, Zou Jingyuan finally completely put down the burden, played perfectly, and won the gold medal on parallel bars steadily.
At the Tokyo Olympic Games, the gymnastics team won the "turnaround battle" with a score of 3 gold, 3 silver and 2 bronze. Although the answer sheet is excellent, the process is not smooth, and the pressure carried by the team members during this period can be imagined. Persistent psychological training, adequate preparation for difficulties before the game, and strong psychological quality are all crucial. With the continuous improvement of the training concept, the gymnastics team that aims to win the turnaround battle has paid more attention to the construction and training of the psychological level of the team members in the Tokyo cycle. In 2019, Yang Shujin, from the Sports Psychology Department of Chengdu University of Physical Education, served as a psychologist for the national gymnastics team. Speaking of being a psychologist, Yang Shu's focus is not to help the team members overcome psychological obstacles, but to focus on the psychological training of athletes, which is similar to the role of "psychological coach".
Three minutes on stage, ten years offstage. As a self-expressive grading project, the role of psychological influence in gymnastics programs is self-evident. When he first arrived at the team, Yang Shu did not have a specific task. The gymnastics team gave Yang Shu three months to quickly familiarize himself with the athletes and fully understand the characteristics of the gymnastics project. The progress of the men's team is relatively smooth, and the women's team is not strong in self-expression due to their young age, how to increase the understanding of the female team members and promote communication between the female team members has become the difficulty of Yang Shu's work in the past three months. To this end, every Sunday afternoon, Yang Shu led the female team members to rehearse a psychological drama in the training room. Each time the theme is improvised, the girls play their own roles, "using the mouth of the character to express some of their emotions, opinions and opinions." Psychodrama not only promotes communication and mutual understanding among the team members, but also "teaches them to see things from the perspective of others."
Three months later, Yang Shu, who was fully familiar with the team and gymnastics projects, began to carry out psychological training in many aspects such as athlete concentration control, self-confidence regulation, and key athlete protection. She brought a set of biofeedback devices that athletes could play games with to observe their mental state in real time. This training requires the athlete to "put his or her concentration in a state that is neither focused nor excessively concentrated", and this moderate tension is most suitable for the athlete's competition. This training helps athletes remember this feeling, get in faster during the game and prolong it as long as possible.
The method of athlete psychological training is not the same, and Yang Shu formulates corresponding training programs according to the different characteristics and needs of key athletes. Liu Yang is more pragmatic, trusts the feedback brought by data, and prefers to do training in biological instruments. The effect of Sun Wei's direct training of biological instruments is ideal, and Yang Shu simply let Sun Wei imagine his free exercises from beginning to end when playing the game, and find the technical difficulties that are not good enough in the movements through the feedback of biological instruments. Although Zou Jingyuan is not familiar with the operation of the instrument, he has a strong desire to express himself, so he prefers to talk to Yang Shu about technology, and Yang Shu will help Zou Jingyuan sort out the training content of the day through his professional skills.
Leading, falling behind, making mistakes, accidents... Anything can happen on the field. How to help athletes cope with various situations and ensure that the on-the-spot performance is not affected by the competition situation is the meaning of psychological training. Before the Olympic Games, the coaching staff repeatedly trained to simulate adversity. They let the scientific researchers and auxiliary personnel act as spectators and create an atmosphere of on-site viewing, simulating the situation on the field and reporting scores in Chinese and English, and even simulating the backwardness or mistakes of the Chinese team, testing the athletes' ability to resist pressure and requiring athletes to be familiar with the game strategy in adversity.
The team made meticulous preparations at the level of on-site psychological protection, and Yang Shu's team prepared a procedural participation strategy for the athletes. This strategy not only envisions very difficult situations, but even situations that may not occur in the game at all. The strategy tells athletes in chronological order what to do and think at each time node before departure, pre-game check-in, and debut, so that athletes have a bottom of mind, and also extensively collects the opinions of team leaders, athletes, and coaches, lists and categorizes issues that may affect the game. The strategy even includes stomach pain before playing, traffic jams on the way to the stadium, stadium power outages, and other extremely unlikely things to occur, to ensure that athletes are not affected by such situations and can focus all their attention on the game and action. The participation strategy formulated by Yang Shu for Zou Jingyuan even envisioned that the team did not get a gold medal, and all the pressure to win gold was pressed down on the most difficult situation of the parallel bars event on the afternoon of the last competition. It is the existence of this strategy that helped Zou Jingyuan adjust his psychological state in time after the men's team competition.
Yang Shu's home is in Chengdu. Because she has been with the team for many years, she is not familiar with the situation around her home. During the training with the team, Yang Shu once went to the hospital for surgery due to illness, and returned to the team after the operation almost without recuperation. When asked why he was so devoted to his work, Yang Shu said: "I don't feel that I am working hard, I am doing what I like to do." Help athletes to play their due level, let their sweat and efforts be as much as possible not in vain, and let their regrets be less. ”
As the only full-time psychology teacher in the team, Yang Shu does not think that the psychological work of the team is done by himself. "The training and preparation of the entire sports team is not a separate process, and many people are acting as psychological teachers." Previously, due to the epidemic, athletes had no competition to participate in, and whether they could participate in the Olympic Games was still unknown, and many team members may have psychological burnout. Ye Zhennan, deputy director of the Gymnastics Sports Management Center of the General Administration, comes to the team every day to be with everyone, and this kind of companionship is a kind of support.
"It's a whole, it's coordinated by the whole team. When everyone is together, all hearts are together, things can succeed. Yang Shu's words expressed the essence of the Chinese gymnastics team's victory in the "turnaround battle" in Tokyo. (Produced by Fu Yuanjie)
