The Importance of Mental Toughness

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

In my opinion, mental toughness is the greatest thing that you can potentially gain from the weight room and off-season program. Notice I said “potentially gain”. There is no guarantee that you will actually gain mental toughness just by your kids showing up. You must “teach” it to them. There are various ways of doing this, none greater than endurance challenges.

As the coach, you can control the difficulty of the drills and exercises being performed on a daily basis. Since that is the case, at Cardinal Stritch we work to make the workouts tough enough that our kids will not be able to complete the entire workout or set without taking a small break. 

An example of this is Coach Baden (Strength & Conditioning) will tell our guys to do a set of Mountain Climbers. We may not give them a set number, but rather, we time them and don’t let them know how long we will be timing them for. We know it is tough even for the most in-shape athletes to complete this task without take a few seconds to pause when it is combined with all of the other exercises in the workout. The thought behind this is: lets say you wish for your players to be able to do 45 seconds of Mountain Climbers. If we time them for a minute and they take 2 or 3, 3-second breaks throughout, they are actually doing 51-54 seconds worth of them, which is more than what we had planned. Also, by demanding more than what they can do, you are forcing them to fight through the exercise whenever they are thinking of quitting. 

By using this philosophy, it has improved our teams overall mental toughness exponentially thus far. Between raising our expectations of competition and trying to “teach” mental toughness as best as we can, we have actually improved at a rate (in those two categories) much faster than what I had originally planned for this football team. That means we will need to spend a lot less time on these things once our summer camp days begin and can focus on football more. 

Some may think that getting bigger, faster, and stronger is the most important thing that can be gained from the weight room. Although I feel this is very important to our overall success, I feel like it is naturally going to happen. What I mean is, I have hired a first-class strength coach to take care of the physical aspects of the summer plan. If our kids show up, I am more than confident they will get stronger. That is a byproduct of showing up. 

When you think about it, the alternative would be laying in bed at home. When you compare the two, showing up to the weight room for a workout is obviously going to get you stronger, bigger, and faster than being at home. Therefore, I focus on the mental aspect the entire time, personally. I try to drive and motivate our kids to push through it and to begin to tap into their full potential. Are we completely there yet? No. But the good news is that we are making decent strides every single day towards our ultimate goal: become a championship winning football program.