The first function of the brain to be aware of is the habit function. This has all the skills and knowledge an athlete will have developed from practice. It means they can make all the micro decisions they need without fatiguing their brain and still allows them to do all the basics even when their brain has been hijacked by the threat function.
We can think of our habit function like a storage unit; holding all our values, skills, strengths and techniques, working away in the background using all the stored information to make automatic decisions based on pre-programmed thoughts and behaviours developed over years of practice.
The habit function is particularly important for an athlete with ADHD as their brain knows WHAT to do, just doesn’t always DO it. Once something is habitual the process of one part of your brain telling the other part what to do becomes redundant and your body just acts automatically. Additionally, having your habits work away in the background, making thousands of unconscious decisions for you (35,000 a day according to research) means you have more headspace left over for the decisions and actions which do require more strategy or tactical knowledge.
In takes on average 66 days to build a new habit. So the drills you give your athletes may feel repetitive and they may complain but they are essential for developing robust technique that won’t fall apart under pressure.
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