How Crazy Can Mental Toughness Get?

I take my last comment back, I have to agree with londonboxer and elevenmag… I saw a special on Green Berett’s and how they were selected yesterday…

wow.

I think there is allot to the fragility of ego.

It takes time to temper that - and make it useful.
sometimes its about being hungry
or having nothing else going on in your life
Id call that drive.

its just about doing your job- or doing what you do to pay rent bills etc

really I think mental toughness in respect to combat athletes-
not combat professionals soldiers- there is a difference that merits its own discussion

sometimes its easy to confuse this with drive
or the peeps who need to train to not be evil 24/7

drive- sometimes people need a measure of accomplishment or success in an otherwise
dreary or shit filled life -read peeps who overcome or use adversity for motivation

mental toughness-

what you have to do to do your job

not yielding to shit that gets in the way of your goals
not just in the tape up my knee and train hard kind of bullshit.

not yielding to shit that gets in the way of your goals

manage the distractions
thriving on pressure
and to face it all positively

its allot easier to just see training or suffering or sacrifice
as positive steps to reaching a goal vs an obstacle

welcome the pressure of success and the discomfort of training
to just do your job

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
From what I have seen - and I know A LOT of fighters - they’re some of the most mentally fragile, childlike people I’ve ever met.

Real mental toughness is forged in a different way than punching people.[/quote]

Mind elaborating?
[/quote]

It’s funny, now that you asked me to elaborate, I thought about it all the way to and from boxing last night, and this is the conclusion that I arrived at.

I’ve noticed that people tend to use the term “mental toughness” as a synonym for “disciplined,” when in reality it’s something wholly different.

Anybody, and maybe especially athletes, tend to be disciplined. Waking up at 5 a.m. to do your roadwork, going to the gym when you’ve had a long day, slogging through long sessions even though you’re kind of shot, that’s discipline, and all fighters have to have some degree of it or they’d just be punching bags in the ring.

And coaches and trainers can help with this as well when they hold an athlete to a schedule, and, during the session, push them to do those last couple of miles/rounds/laps/sets, etc. This is just disciplined training.

Mental toughness is very different, and the best definition I could come up with is “Doing something that you in no way want to do, but go ahead with anyway.” In this regard, it is closer to courage than it is to discipline - doing what is utterly necessary to achieve a goal, no matter how much prolonged misery it’s causing.

I mean, we all love being in the gym, or else we wouldn’t do it. We go crazy if we go too long without strapping on the gloves and gettin’ it in, and even when we say we hate it, we couldn’t live without it. It doesn’t take “mental toughness” to do what we do; in all honesty, it might take more mental toughness for us to SKIP the gym and go to work every day for a year. It would be tougher to “retire.”

But your mental toughness will be on display sometimes, and fighting can be one kind of proving ground for whether or not you’ve got it.

It’s taking that punch that REALLY buzzes you, and makes every ounce of your being want to quit fighting and just ensure that you don’t get caught with THAT ONE again - but then being able to clear your opponent, settle down, calm your mind, and re-engage. And it’s being able to do that over and over and over again.

It’s that story in “Little Black Book of Violence” about Utah cop Sgt. Marcus Young, who engaged with a psychopath and ended up getting his right arm shattered by a bullet and his left arm torn up by a knife. The psycho then stabbed an unarmed security guard that tried to help the cop, and then dove into the cop car to try and unlock the heavy weaponry to finish the job. As he did though, Young had the training cadet who was riding with him put his gun in his mangled left hand, kneeled on the ground to steady his aim, and then shot the suspect through the car window. He then started breathing techniques to keep himself conscious and alive until help arrived.

It took him over a year to recover from the injuries he sustained. THAT is mental toughness - you’re placed in a situation where you’re in trouble, and you know it, but you do what needs to be done anyway.

If you’re looking for examples of fighters with mental toughness in and out of the ring, look at Micky Ward. Came from nothing, fought his way to the top. In life and in the ring, the guy had lost every round, but he would just find a way to win, to persevere, to push on even when most guys would have thought that all was lost.

Mike Tyson would be the opposite: a disciplined fighter who won the genetic lottery in every conceivable way (physically) but always had a fragile, utterly weak mind. I’m not even talking about when he consistently faded when fighting real fighters in real fights that went past six rounds, I’m talking about his actions outside of the ring, from going after Teddy Atlas’ daughter to the rapes and the drugs and the maniacal, off-the-wall behavior that showed he just could not handle things.

Moving away from fighting, mental toughness is the single mom who has three kids and works 12 or 15 hour days to support them, day in and day out, even though she would rather be doing anything else in the world.

The antithesis of that is rich kids who have everything handed to them, and have every opportunity, but end up as drug addicts or drunks. He may have been disciplined, or disciplined enough to get him into a good school or job or whatever, but he couldn’t handle LIFE.

And I guess that’s what it’s about.

Mental toughness and psychology for starters do not go in the same sentence. Psychology, it’s inception, progression and much of it’s current state has been the shortfall of humanity as we know it.
No other wannabe pseudo science can ever live up to the damage psychology has had on the human race for the last 200 or so years since it began.

Don’t ever claim your knowledge of it or try to prove something through it because you will only be signing yourself up to be pinned on the board for dunces.
Psychology is a scam to profiteer the policy makers, that is all.

With that disclaimer, I agree 100% with Irish, I’ve fought and trained with world champs at superheavy weight. Don’t come much bigger and badder than that but I’m a fucken bitch compared to my father.

65 years of age, diabetes that has completely eaten and destroyed his health, barely has any eyesight left, has a disfigured foot from a diabetic episode he had, has several herniated discs for years, is overweight because of his diabetes, has lost much of his sensation, doesn’t hear well because he has a cauliflower ears from the diabetes issues, is insulin dependent, high blood pressured and high cholesteroled has been hospitalised several times and had more chassis twisting car accidents than insurance companies care to comment on yet still wakes up at 3 am 7 days a week to work 12 hour shifts on a cab because he believes so long as he can get up in the morning then he should be working.

In this day and age of fucked up pussy boys that don’t go to school let alone work because of a sniffle, that is fucking mental toughness.

Fighters? Bahahahahaha Forrest? dude buckled under a jab. Fuck him

Yeah humble fuck all those pussy ass “victims” of PTSD, they don’t need legit treatment to stave the wave of depression leading to suicide they just need to eat some fuckin concrete right!?

Yo dude I like you, but that post is by far some of the dumbest shit said on this forum, I sincerely hope you weren’t being completely serious with the comment about psychology.

[quote]ElevenMag wrote:
True mental toughness is persevering through torture while staying mentally intact. [/quote]

I like this. This rings true to my idea of mental toughness.

And when I read torture, I don’t automatically think about the physical aspect (strapping someone to a chair and frying his cock with electric wires) but mostly the mental one. How many SEALS recruits crumble under instructors abuse? How much abuse can one takes before he or she shows cracks?

It’s all about the ability to mentally shut off under high pressure, not letting external circumstances affect you and staying focused when shit goes down.

I am currently reading a book on the Legions of Rome and the Romans had a concept I found pretty interesting and I was hoping some of you modern military guys could chime in on it seems it has to do with this subject.

Basically the Romans believed in every ten men that two would lead,seven would follow, and one would wanna run. So thats why they broke up into small ten man groups inside the hundred man century. The idea that the other nine would keep the coward from running and that the two who where more leadership oriented would push the other seven forward.

I am curious if that holds true to what the battlefield of today is. If the forces of today are still the ten similiar to what the Romans believed.

On the subject, there is a quote by Heraclitus that goes ?Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.?

That ‘one’ that Heraclitus talks about, is what I have always understood by extraordinary mental strength. The difference between the ‘fighters’ and the ‘warrior’ is a mentality. It isn’t a skill thing, or a superior genetic immunity to pain, it is a level of resolve beyond the comprehension of all but a few.

[quote]LondonBoxer123 wrote:
On the subject, there is a quote by Heraclitus that goes ?Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.?

That ‘one’ that Heraclitus talks about, is what I have always understood by extraordinary mental strength. The difference between the ‘fighters’ and the ‘warrior’ is a mentality. It isn’t a skill thing, or a superior genetic immunity to pain, it is a level of resolve beyond the comprehension of all but a few. [/quote]

That is an amazing quote.

You make some great posts.

[quote]punchedbear wrote:
I am currently reading a book on the Legions of Rome and the Romans had a concept I found pretty interesting and I was hoping some of you modern military guys could chime in on it seems it has to do with this subject.

Basically the Romans believed in every ten men that two would lead,seven would follow, and one would wanna run. So thats why they broke up into small ten man groups inside the hundred man century. The idea that the other nine would keep the coward from running and that the two who where more leadership oriented would push the other seven forward.

I am curious if that holds true to what the battlefield of today is. If the forces of today are still the ten similiar to what the Romans believed. [/quote]

Platoons are compromised of 4 sections and a section is (about) 10 individuals.

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:

[quote]punchedbear wrote:
I am currently reading a book on the Legions of Rome and the Romans had a concept I found pretty interesting and I was hoping some of you modern military guys could chime in on it seems it has to do with this subject.

Basically the Romans believed in every ten men that two would lead,seven would follow, and one would wanna run. So thats why they broke up into small ten man groups inside the hundred man century. The idea that the other nine would keep the coward from running and that the two who where more leadership oriented would push the other seven forward.

I am curious if that holds true to what the battlefield of today is. If the forces of today are still the ten similiar to what the Romans believed. [/quote]

Platoons are compromised of 4 sections and a section is (about) 10 individuals.
[/quote]

I was thinking more the attitude or what they said stand up. Not the size of the group but the mentallity of it.

[quote]LondonBoxer123 wrote:
On the subject, there is a quote by Heraclitus that goes ?Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.?

That ‘one’ that Heraclitus talks about, is what I have always understood by extraordinary mental strength. The difference between the ‘fighters’ and the ‘warrior’ is a mentality. It isn’t a skill thing, or a superior genetic immunity to pain, it is a level of resolve beyond the comprehension of all but a few. [/quote]

how you gonna say you disagree with me and then make my point for me???lol like i said, nine real fighters, example( navy seal) but the one warrior is special. has nothing to do with anything that can be trained. period.

No, you misunderstand the mentality. The ‘one’ is the guy who makes it through selection, (or Navy SEALS recruitment, assuming the SEALS are the single most elite unit of the US army, I don’t know). My point is not your point. You think the nine are the elite. They aren’t, the nine are the guys who would fail selection to these units, but still be great fighters in their respective units.

The ‘nine’ are real fighters, but they are still relatively commonplace (based on the statistics of Heraclitus’ quote, they account for 9% of the population). The ‘one’, the ‘warrior’ is the guy who would make it through and who finds himself working in a small group of 4/5. It is no coincidence that special forces squads are not bound by the principle of 10.

[quote]DarkNinjaa wrote:

[quote]ElevenMag wrote:
True mental toughness is persevering through torture while staying mentally intact. [/quote]

I like this. This rings true to my idea of mental toughness.

And when I read torture, I don’t automatically think about the physical aspect (strapping someone to a chair and frying his cock with electric wires) but mostly the mental one. How many SEALS recruits crumble under instructors abuse? How much abuse can one takes before he or she shows cracks?

It’s all about the ability to mentally shut off under high pressure, not letting external circumstances affect you and staying focused when shit goes down.[/quote]

I was thinking of special forces and operatives trained to endure anything thrown at them mentally and physically but you bring up a good point. Think about aron ralstad. The guy who cut off his arm, bone and all, when stranded with it stuck between a boulder and a cliff face with a rusty pocket knife. When I think about it I don’t know many people who could keep their shit together, preform an amputation, and make it out of the desert alive in that situation.

[quote]humble wrote:
Mental toughness and psychology for starters do not go in the same sentence. Psychology, it’s inception, progression and much of it’s current state has been the shortfall of humanity as we know it.
No other wannabe pseudo science can ever live up to the damage psychology has had on the human race for the last 200 or so years since it began.

Don’t ever claim your knowledge of it or try to prove something through it because you will only be signing yourself up to be pinned on the board for dunces.
Psychology is a scam to profiteer the policy makers, that is all.[/quote]

I honestly feel bad for you, i’m not even angry that you are calling me a fraud. I seriously hope you don’t ever have a psicotic breakout, suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder or have a kid with general mental development disorder.

[quote]Heroic Wolf wrote:
John McCarthy has a story about how Forrest Griffin once gave himself 3rd degree burns on the forearm with a lighter to mess with a mutual coworker in the police department Forrest didn’t like (and then went right back to watching a movie like nothing had happened).

I also remember a post fight interview with Chris Leben admitting that he didn’t remember a thing from the Yoshihiro Akiyama fight and would have to go watch the tape to see what happened. Then of course, there’s Ben Rothwell beating Gilbert Yvel by decision despite tearing his ACL in the first round and other crazy shit like that.

Does anyone know if being willing to go this far is typical of UFC fighters?[/quote]

Some very good follow-ups in this thread. I would add a couple of more things. Cage fighters pre-suppose that their stuff is safe, which is why they can go balls to the wall the way they do. A lack of understanding of risk and discounting injury as being in the same category as training soreness does not make them tough.

For instance, couple weeks ago I had a pretty passable judoka stop in to check out my school. We do various things and for grins and giggles, I decide to do some joint work since he seems interested. I showed him how to do a standing ude garami (really nasty old school technique against a sword, aka kimura). So what does he do? He resists as hard as possible. Mind you I am standing with his arm pretzeled and if I finish the technique (by dropping to a knee) I am quite sure the torque will dislocate his shoulder. The issue is that Judo only does shoulder locks on the ground. He has no concept that anything other than fighting off the tap will work. In short, his training has predisposed him to serious injury. I have seen this in many combat athletes. It is not toughness, but trained cluelessness that may result in severe injury in other circumstances.

“Victory or death!” sounds great as long as you aren’t really going to get hurt. Concussions and contusions are just fine as part of the tradeoff. Other serious injuries (torn ACLs, broken legs) can happen but not with enough regularity to worry about. The presumption going into the ring is, overwhelmingly, high wear and tear in a very safe environment. Look at the UFC’s own website where they are very long on how much safer it is than any other sport. They had to start spilling the beans when their own marketing hype about it being “real fighting” started to be taken seriously and they were being barred from running fights. Food for thought.

And as always, I am probably just full of shit…

– jj

PS. My dad was a US AF pilot and, on a whim, decided to sign up for astronaut training (this would have been ca. 1963). After a preliminary checkup, they gave him his first task: Hold his breath until he passed out. The reason was that they weren’t sure what would happen in space. They also told him that all astronauts were issued cyanide capsules and might be ordered to use them on command if, e.g., some strange pathogen were acquired during a mission, right after piloting their ship permanently into deep space. Here is an example of real world toughness. Or how about those Chernobyl workers who voluntarily walked into radioactive live steam to turn off the reactor manually? They came out hideously burned and got to die of radiation poisoning to boot over the next few days. Yeah getting in a ring with a sprained knee is way tough. “Play” is doing something very seriously which has no practical consequences…

george chuvalo is mental toughness personified in a combat athelete

[quote]Pinta wrote:

[quote]humble wrote:
Mental toughness and psychology for starters do not go in the same sentence. Psychology, it’s inception, progression and much of it’s current state has been the shortfall of humanity as we know it.
No other wannabe pseudo science can ever live up to the damage psychology has had on the human race for the last 200 or so years since it began.

Don’t ever claim your knowledge of it or try to prove something through it because you will only be signing yourself up to be pinned on the board for dunces.
Psychology is a scam to profiteer the policy makers, that is all.[/quote]

I honestly feel bad for you, i’m not even angry that you are calling me a fraud. I seriously hope you don’t ever have a psicotic breakout, suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder or have a kid with general mental development disorder.
[/quote]

Hard to have ‘it’ if I don’t believe in it. lol.

You’d think after years of university studying psychology, you’d at least know how to spell something (psicotic???) that is so paramount in your field.

For your information I did study it at university and I have come to my own conclusions about it 12 years ago so it’s going to take a lot more than a fresh graduate to persuade me otherwise.

Oh and for more information, I do have a child with developmental disabilities, thank you for not wishing it upon me but what God wants, He gets and I am quite content dealing with it in my own way but not so naive as to think I know it all. So he has seen professionals and all agree that my method of dealing with it has netted the best results, ie a happy go lucky child who doesn’t know what it means to fail, is not stigmatised and enjoys his childhood like all children should.

If you love and adore the subject you have based your life on, then dive deeper into their waters and dig up the dirt on them and see from where and why it originated and developed otherwise this probably isn’t the place to be playing intellectuals with each other.

I think “Mental Toughness” is a term that is a bit clumsy. It seems to mean different things to different people. Maybe even different things to the SAME people if the context changes.

In this thread we seem to be linking it with a sort of “mental fitness”, in that it is implied that there has to be an ability to still function at something, rather than merely not “giving up”, the Forest Griffin example not withstanding.

FightinIrish did a good job of dealing with the “toughness as discipline” aspect, with regards to simply being willing to “work” and not get side tracked. This may be as big a key to success as anything more remarkable.

In Idaho’s example though it wasn’t just a “slog through” or “don’t quit” scenario. It was a case where decision making also had to happen. That is certainly a different kind of thing than pure “pain tolerance” or “discipline”. Basically, having to train through boredom and injury sucks. Having to fight while exhausted, hurt, and facing defeat sucks. Having to remain capable of high level mental function while injured, hurting, tired, and facing death is a whole different kind of suck.

In my experience excelling at one kind of “toughness” does not necessarily mean that you will exhibit other types. Irish noted that the training discipline and pain tolerance of fighters often does not coincide with other types of toughness. I would not be at all surprised if the soldier in Idaho’s story, whose actions are pretty close to irrefutable evidence of manhood, exhibited some kind of seemingly incongruous weakness regarding a different kind of pain or trauma, dental work, divorce, whatever. Even the difference between being frustrated and “in it to win it” can matter. While boxing and MMA pale in comparison to Idaho’s measure of “tough” we should remember that Roberto Duran had his “no mas” moment, and Forrest Griffin, he of self inflicted burns, did what he did against Silva.

Finally, I would note that “toughness” or resolve is often an attribute that can be depleted, rather than built up, by repeated “use”. There is a reason that any military that can afford to rotates troops through “combat”. It is not wholly related to maintenance of equipment or skills.

Regards,

Robert A

[quote]jj-dude wrote:
I showed him how to do a standing ude garami (really nasty old school technique against a sword, aka kimura). So what does he do? He resists as hard as possible. Mind you I am standing with his arm pretzeled and if I finish the technique (by dropping to a knee) I am quite sure the torque will dislocate his shoulder.[/quote]

jj-dude,

Please forgive the hijack, but I am having trouble picturing what droping to the knee buys you.

I am familiar, and practiced, with standing ude garami techniques where the shoulder is externally rotated(a la a “high five position”, usually called an American by the BJJ set, or a top wrist lock by the catch wrestling/shootfighting crew) where dropping down either affects a take down if done politely, or a trip to the orthopod if done with more enthusiasm.

However when it comes to standing “kimura” techniques the joint destructions I am familiar with leave you standing, the the “dropping” techniques tend to be sacrifice throws.

Could you sort of walk me through it. I apologize if it is obvious, I haven’t had any coffee yet.

Regards,

Robert A