There are athletes who have no difficulty understanding that mental training is a daily commitment. They often say, “All is well.”
When I was young, Everything is fine was the phrase I used to write to my mother when I sent her postcards in the summer, it was a way to reassure her. Of course she thought I didn’t really want to say how I was doing and she was right.
How did the training go: “All right.” Do we learn anything from this sentence about how that session went? Yes, that the athlete is not aware of what they did or more trivially that they don’t want to talk about it.
When the response refers to psychological aspects of training it is meant to mean: “I did what the coach told me and I committed to doing my best.” This seemingly positive response excludes any information regarding how I did the exercises, how I dealt with mistakes, how I corrected myself, and so on. In other words, the athlete’s response is global but does not provide specific information about the performance of the training. We don’t know, for example, if there were drops in concentration or if the activity was carried out with the necessary level of intensity.
We learn, first of all ourselves, not to use these two terms “All right” and teach athletes to be specific and not to take refuge in this reassuring approach.
