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Ever wish you had a switch you could just turn whenever you needed to be focused and productive?

While getting in the zone is something we all hope and strive for — whether it’s at work, at home, at school — it’s critically important for athletes.

In episode three of TED’s podcast “Good Sport,” host Jody Avirgan speaks to NBA All-Star Steph Curry and sports psychologist Dr. Nicole Detling to find out about getting there. Read an excerpt below, and listen to the entire episode here.

Jody Avirgan, host of “Good Sport” podcast: In sports, there’s a lot of talk about a magical place called THE ZONE.

You probably know it. It’s that place where everything clicks, where no matter the weather or the crowd or the sweat in your eyes, nothing can break your focus. Where you just do everything perfectly, you sink every shot and nothing can stop you. Steph, do you believe in the zone?

Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors point guard and nine-time NBA All-Star: I do believe in the zone, because it’s the one time that everything kind of goes on autopilot. And there’s just synergy with everything that you’re trying to do. Even your intentions are then validated by the atmosphere around you. Where it seems like everything else is going right at the same time, you kind of get lost in that moment. But here’s the thing about “the zone” — almost by definition, it’s special and fleeting and you can’t force it.

You can’t control any of that. It’s just for me, when it goes away, it’s the reflection on the feeling you just had. I think it’s just a natural experience.

I don’t think you can train yourself to appreciate it more than just you naturally do. ‘Cause if you do, then you start to distract yourself from what’s actually happening.

Jody: So you heard it directly from Steph Curry. Nice as it is when you find yourself in the zone, obsessing over getting there — and listen, there’s a lot of obsessing about the zone — will get in the way of what you’re trying to do.

Enter Dr. Nicole Detling, an expert on the mental side of the game. She’s a sports psychologist who’s worked with Olympic skiers and skaters, pro baseball and football and soccer players, college gymnasts — athletes at the very top of their sports.

As she starts to work with athletes, she tries to shift their thinking. She tells them to not think about the feeling they’re trying to capture but instead to work on building a solid and reliable skill.

That skill is mental resilience, which means being able to find whatever version of calm and focus you can, even when things aren’t going your way. It’s not elusive or magical; it’s a habit.

Dr. Nicole Detling, sports psychologist: We have these thinking processes and patterns and skills that we’re teaching people to eventually get it to automate. So it’s an automatic process. Rather than having to turn on that mindset, you become that mindset.

Jody: So much of mental resilience is realizing that everything isn’t going to go perfectly. I’ve worked on that. I’ve worked on — and here’s one of my favorite cliches — getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

The good news, Dr. Detling says, is that you can train for that.

Nicole: Some of the things that we’ve done with some of the skiing Olympians that I’ve worked with is we’ve not waxed their skis and they’ve had to train with unwaxed skis. Same with speed skating — you know that your blades aren’t quite as sharp as you would want them to be. Train that way, train with forgetting there’s a little tiny little tear in your suit. Train without your goggles.

That’s why a lot of teams will pipe in crowd noise so they can’t hear during training sessions. Because at the end of the day, we all want to show up and feel great but yet there will be days — sometimes the biggest competition of your life — and you show up feeling like crap. If you’ve trained feeling like crap, then you know you can compete feeling like crap.

Everyone — yes, everyone, not just sports fans — can learn something from listening to the “Good Sport” podcast, from how to debate better (sportscaster-style!) to how stadiums could be built more equitably. Discover more about yourself and the world around you as host Jody Avirgan talks to star athletes and eye-opening experts, including psychologists, journalists, economists and more. Listen here, or wherever you stream your podcasts.

Watch Jody’s personal intro to the episode — and also catch the episode itself — in this YouTube video: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hayley Caldwell is a copywriter on the Audience Development team at TED.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Alamy

From tennis to swimming and soccer, female athletes are at the top of their game right now, but they are still not receiving the support that men do.

Despite accumulating international titles, the US women’s national soccer team are currently having to pursue a gender discrimination lawsuit for equal pay (above, a photo of them from August 2019). In advance of the trial, their governing body, U.S. Soccer, has filed court documents declaring them less skilled than their male counterparts.

But the problem isn’t just that the gender pay gap also exists in sport — even the average woman just wanting to have enough energy to hit the gym regularly is at a disadvantage. The underlying research that makes good nutrition and effective training possible has also all been done on men, says exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist Stacy Sims in her TEDxTauranga Talk. “[During my early research I was told] ‘women are an anomaly, so we don’t necessarily study women in sport nutrition or exercise science’… I looked around and I thought surely with 50 percent or more of the population being female, aren’t the men the anomaly and they don’t know it yet?”

New Zealand-based Sims is on a mission to get the sporting world to recognize that “women aren’t just small men” but have their own set of nutritional and physiological needs.

While everyone’s body is different, there are patterns in physiology that are particular to most women and deeply impact their training. One of these is the menstrual cycle. Sims is frustrated that this isn’t addressed enough in sport and training. “This is one of the reasons girls drop out of sport, because no one talks about it… and wait til you get to perimenopause and menopause; it’s like tumbleweeds.” She has also seen clients in her own practice who have felt it was normal and “easier” for their periods to disappear during intense training.

While some studies have suggested that it can be useful to plan strength training around your menstrual cycle, and that you may even be more at risk of injury in particular stages of your cycle, we are still lacking a large and robust body of research to tailor training and competition around a fundamental aspect of many top athletes’ physiology.

In nutrition, too, Sims says that studies on high intensity interval training, the ketogenic diet and paleo intermittent fasting are all done on (often sedentary) men, then generalized over to the entire fitness population. “If we look at how women have been marginalized [in this process], they’re just assuming that this information is going to work for them as well.”

This mindset is also letting women down when it comes to something as fundamental as equipment, says Lynn Le. She’s the founder of women’s boxing gear and sportswear brand Society Nine (named after the Title IX legislation that made gender discrimination in sport illegal).

A former kickboxing instructor, Le founded the Portland, Oregon company in 2013 after struggling for years with combat sports equipment that hadn’t been designed for women. Clients would show up to her classes wearing children’s boxing gloves, or “some brand’s version of a pink glove, and they almost always didn’t fit the wrist and feel supportive. The material felt super chintzy; it just had no realm of seriousness at all in either fit or quality, and I realised I didn’t really have a place to direct them.”

Le herself had resorted to doubling up on the hand wraps usually used by combat fighters, so she could force her hand into a fist inside men’s gloves that were too big. As women’s hands are narrower than men’s, Le knew that a dedicated design was necessary not just for comfort but for basic safety.

“[In combat sport] your first line of defense is creating that shock absorption through the power of your own body, which is compressing your hand into as close of a perfectly formed fist as you can. If you’re wearing a glove that’s two sizes too big, how on earth can you possibly do that?… You want to enjoy what you’re doing, and to enjoy what you’re doing, you want to wear things that are comfortable, support you and help you prevent injury.”

Le and her development team also came up against the severe lack of research on women’s physiology when they were trying to design shin guards. There were no studies on how to make a suitable fit for women, despite women having a much more variable sizing from the knee down than men do. “We had to go back to high school biology and really try to understand the human body… Women’s bodies are incredible and complicated. They’re way more different in variability than men’s bodies. That’s the number one thing I’ve learned.”

But for Le, founding Society Nine was about more than solving an equipment problem. “The industry wasn’t really interested in representing all self identifying women, from their products to their stories. If they did, they did it in such a way that it tokenized individual women singularly rather than as a collective. So many brands… only talk about being the one, being the champion, being the winner, and that is not a recipe for longevity.”

Her own experience with combat sports changed her life, and created a community for her when she was going through a difficult period. Now she sees an outpouring of the same stories from her customers.

Le’s aim is to make it known that this community exists far beyond what is regularly shown in advertising, and it is welcoming. “Why we train, whether for fitness or competitively, goes so much deeper than glory or attention.” Society Nine works hard to make sure that whenever the company uses the term “women” that it’s defined as “self-identified women”, and it continues to expand its sizing and representation.

The industry is even more alienating for trans women and intersex athletes, who face not only a lack of representation but a serious dearth of research, with debates and disagreements at the highest level about how and whether they can compete.

In terms of what the future looks like, it’s still an uphill battle. Even now, as a professor at the University of Waikato and having held a research position at Stanford, Sims gets asked why it’s important to study women when “we don’t know enough about men.”

She recently published ROAR, a nutrition and fitness guide for women, and she wants to see more women realising the full and unique potential of their bodies. “We can really work with our physiology to improve our health outcomes, to improve our performance. Whether that be walking up the mountain, running a fast 5k, or winning Ironman. Whatever your goal is.”

For Le, the aim is to keep serving her community and to keep having challenging conversations. Though she received a strong welcome when the company started, some of the push back she encountered in the early days still remains. Like sports pro shop retailers telling her that women don’t really come to their store. “Maybe they don’t come into your store because there’s actually no women’s product. There’s no reason for them to enter if they are shown blatantly that they aren’t served or thought about.”

Society Nine also continues to donate equipment to combat sports programs for women and young people across the country. “I want to keep on helping self-identified women and other underrepresented people. I want them to feel seen … What motivates me isn’t just making really beautiful stuff that works. It’s also telling these women’s stories.”

Watch Stacy Sims’s TEDxTauranga Talk now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

In 1997, Brazilian football player Roberto Carlos set up for a 35 meter free kick with no direct line to the goal. Carlos’s shot sent the ball flying wide of the players, but just before going out of bounds it hooked to the left and soared into the net. How did he do it? Below, Erez Garty describes the physics behind one of the most magnificent goals in the history of football.

According to Newton’s first law of motion, an object will move in the same direction and velocity until a force is applied on it. When Carlos kicked the ball he gave it direction and velocity, but what force made the ball swerve and score one of the most magnificent goals in the history of the sport?

The trick was in the spin. Carlos placed his kick at the lower right corner of the ball, sending it high and to the right, but also rotating around its axis.

The ball started its flight in an apparently direct route, with air flowing on both sides and slowing it down. On one side, the air moved in the opposite direction to the ball’s spin, causing increased pressure, while on the other side—the air moved in the same direction as the spin, creating an area of lower pressure.

That difference made the ball curve towards the lower pressure zone. This phenomenon is called the Magnus effect.

This type of kick, often referred to as a banana kick, is attempted regularly, and it is one of the elements that makes “the beautiful game” beautiful.

But curving the ball with the precision needed to both bend around the wall, and back into the goal is difficult. Too high and it soars over the goal. Too low and it hits the ground before curving. Too wide and it never reaches the goal.

Not wide enough and the defenders intercept it. Too slow and it hooks too early or not at all. Too fast and it hooks too late.

The same physics make it possible to score another apparently impossible goal — an unassisted corner kick.

The Magnus effect was first documented by Sir Isaac Newton after he noticed it while playing a game of tennis back in 1670. It also applies to golf balls, Frisbees and baseballs. In every case the same thing happens: the ball’s spin creates a pressure differential in the surrounding airflow that curves it in the direction of the spin.

And here’s a question: could you theoretically kick a ball hard enough to make it boomerang all the way around back to you? Sadly, no. Even if the ball didn’t disintegrate on impact or hit any obstacles, as the air slowed it, the angle of its deflection would increase, causing it to spiral into smaller and smaller circles until finally stopping. And just to get that spiral you’d have to make the ball spin over 15 times faster than Carlos’s immortal kick. So good luck with that.

Watch the full TED-Ed Lesson: The “impossible” free kick

Animation by TOGETHER/TED-Ed

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In celebration of the summer Olympics, TED-Ed got the chance to work with Olympic gold-medalist, Steve Mesler, on a personal TED-Ed Lesson about two decisions that  put him on the path to Olympic glory. The lesson, which was visualized by Augenblick Studios, was designed to complement Steve’s work at Classroom Champions — an inspiring program created by Steve and his fellow Olympians to connect students in high-need schools with top performing athletes. The athletes work with individual classes around the world, in person and via Skype, to support students in recognizing their potential, setting goals and dreaming big.

A huge bonus in spending a day creating a lesson with an Olympian is the opportunity to try on a gold medal!

[Pictured: Jordan, Logan, Steve, & Bedirhan. Steve is the one who looks like he has competed in the Olympics.]