Training for that winning mentality

KERRY and Tyrone may have stolen their thunder a bit by winning the last seven All-Ireland senior football championships between them, but the Armagh team that annexed the title in 2002 retains an aura that fascinates to this day.

This was a group of strong, but silent men. Leaders. Fellas who would got through the wall for each other.

Or, as Enda McNulty says, men you’d like to have standing with you in a bar-room brawl.

McNulty was just one of many totemic figures in that panel, along with brother Justin, Paul McGrane, Diarmuid Marsden, John and Tony McEntee and, of course, the squad captain, Kieran McGeeney.

Nowadays, he is one of the foremost sports psychologists in the country, or, as he would prefer to be described, a performance excellence coach who specialises in mental training.

He has worked successfully with the likes of Irish rugby stars Brian O’Driscoll and Luke Fitzgerald, athlete David Gillick, as well as numerous teams in a variety of sports. Ian McIver, the Irishman who climbed seven mountains within record time, names him as his number one inspiration.

“Remember the fight is won or lost far away from the bright lights, far away from the clicking cameras. It’s won out there running on the roads at dawn, hitting the heavy bag until your knuckles bleed, getting pounded by a sparring partner until you can’t remember your name,” says McNulty.

“People think it’s easy. It’s far from easy. But nothing easy is worthwhile. Work harder than you ever did before but work smart as well.”

So said McNulty to Gillick at an LA training camp in 2007. Gillick is now the sixth best 400m hurdler in the world.

So it was no surprise the 33-year-old founder of Motiv8 had a sizeable and attentive audience when speaking at the GAA Games Development Conference in Croke Park on Saturday.

McNulty invoked legendary figures such as Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali and Usain Bolt as people who had obvious ability but, more importantly, possessed what he called “competitive greatness”.

In other words, they always produced on the big occasion.

That can be attributed to character, mental strength, absence of fear and confidence and, as most GAA teams are acknowledging nowadays, these areas require just as much training as is needed for skills and physical fitness.

“We very often find that it’s piecemeal,” McNulty observed. “That it’s firefighting. It happens once a year, once every six months; it happens the week before the championship final.

“Sometimes it might do your team harm to invite them along in a once-off. If you’re thinking about leadership development, if you’re thinking about team-building, or if you’re thinking about mental toughness training, you’re thinking about a programme.”

A team needs to develop a host of leaders if it is not to choke on the big day, according to McNulty, and he points to his former Armagh team-mates as examples.

“I can honestly tell you if there was a bar-room brawl in Dublin tonight, I know where to call to go into that fight to sort it out. I would take any of those guys.

“If you want to win a battle, in a Gaelic football match, rugby, hurling, camogie or any sport, (you) want guys that would win a bar-room brawl. “They weren’t going to be walking away, they weren’t going to be pulling out, they weren’t going to be stepping back.”

That might sound a bit sinister, but it we all know we’d rather have Roy Keane on our side when the chips are down than Cristiano Ronaldo. We talk about born leaders but it is a trait that can be developed, says McNulty.

“Leadership development in business, school and sport in Ireland; we don’t emphasise, we don’t coach, we don’t develop, hardly at all.

“Mental conditioning is similar to physical conditioning. At four-to-six weeks, you can see a marked difference in confidence, in composure, in leadership, in concentration only if, and it’s a big if, you put the same amount of time and effort into it as you do in your physical conditioning.”

Research has calculated that it takes 10,000 hours to transform a six-year-old into an elite athlete of 26, which explains why not everybody reaches that level. The key though, is to continue striving for improvement.

That’s why Pádraig Harrington changed the swing that brought him three majors. Why Gillick is still looking to find an edge somewhere, even though he is a two-time European indoor champion and reached the world championship final this year.

“His attitude is a ‘CAN I’ attitude”, McNulty explains. “Continual And Never-ending Improvement. Imagine if your team had that philosophy. Imagine if your team had that attitude. I was very lucky to play on an Armagh team that had that will.

“It’s about having that unbelievable will. A will to continue to improve, to continue to develop and get better, every single aspect of preparation.

“One of Muhammad Ali’s most famous quotes might be appropriate. ‘Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something deep inside them. A desire, a dream, a vision. You have to have the skill and the will but the will must be stronger than the skill.’

“If you’re team’s will is teak tough, they’ve got one hell of a good chance of achieving their potential.”

* Enda McNulty is holding a mental training seminar in Dublin’s Stillorgan Park Hotel on December 7.