Planned Disruptions
When we started our work with Olympic Weightlifters four years ago, we often found ourselves working with lifters who had developed fast, meaning they were on national and international stages not long after they began completing. We use the graph you see here to describe what we saw happen related to physical vs. mental growth.
We were faced with helping athletes fill the gap, acquiring mental skills, psychological flexibility, and resilience without much exposure to actual high pressure situations. We started digging into the pressure training research and specifically, how the use of planned disruptions (a form of pressure training), could help us better prepare lifters for competition stressors and pressure. Whether it be unpredictable rest times, the noise and movement in the crowd, time zone and location changes, or the fatigue and frustration related to a hard weight cut, planned disruptions provided an avenue for allowing lifters to practice execution under less than ideal mental conditions. Today, planned disruptions are a tool we use with many of our athletes, both those newer and more experienced in their sports.
We were fortunate to interview national and international level USAW coaches about their planned disruption use for a study during our time at Florida State. We presented the results and how they can be used to inform planned disruption use at the end of 2024 and are currently preparing to submit the study for publication. However, we’ve been experimenting with some new AI tools and developed a “podcast” of sorts on planned disruptions using our findings and those of Kegelaers et al. (2020). We wanted to share this resource with you all for a less formal way of learning about planned disruptions. The podcast focuses on what planned disruptions are and what they look like in action. We hope to follow-up with another post on the support for pressure training and planned disruption use.
Kegelaers, J., Wylleman, P., & Oudejans, R. R. (2020). A coach perspective on the use of planned disruptions in high-performance sports. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 9(1), 29.
Kinnamon, K, & Bean, W. (October, 2024). Disrupting the Norm: Investigating the Use of Planned Disruptions Among Elite Olympic Weightlifting Coaches. Lecture presented at the Association for Applied Sport Psychology Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV.