Sport has long taught athletes to be a rock. But that version of mental toughness can make struggling feel like failing, and keep athletes silent. Here's why flexibility is the better goal.

Athletes experience mental health difficulties as often as anyone else, but only around one in five who are struggling seek help. Here's what the research actually shows, and what closes the gap.

We've written before on the Surge blog about graduating from a level or a programme, the closure, the reconnecting with values, the rebuilding of purpose. This blog sits alongside that one but looks specifically at the harder end of the spectrum: full retirement from competitive sport, what the evidence says it actually does to mental health, and a newer framework researchers are proposing for how sport should prepare athletes for it. The Numbers Are Bigger Than Most People A

We've written before on this site about the emotional stages of injury recovery and about how to support someone you care about through it. This blog goes a layer deeper, into a specific mechanism that shapes how well that recovery actually goes: what an injury does to an athlete's sense of identity, and why that matters just as much for the comeback as the physical rehab itself. The Return-to-Sport Question Isn't Just Physical When we talk about "return to sport," the conver

Most of what gets written and talked about in sport psychology focuses on athletes leaving sport, retirement, injury, deselection. Far less attention goes to a transition every serious athlete faces earlier and often with just as much psychological weight: the jump in. Moving from junior to senior level, from club to representative programme, from school sport to college sport, from talented kid to one competitor among many talented adults. This blog looks specifically at tha

Ask most committed athletes who they are, and "athlete" is usually near the top of the list, sometimes it's the whole list. That's not unusual, and it's not automatically a problem. A strong sense of yourself as an athlete can fuel discipline, resilience, and a genuine love of your sport. But research on athletic identity has also identified a real risk hiding inside that strength: what happens to your sense of self when the sport is taken away, even temporarily. This blog lo

Most parents on the sideline are not trying to add pressure. They are trying to help: to encourage, to motivate, to show they care about how the game goes. But the evidence is clear that parental behaviour, even well-intentioned behaviour, shapes how much pressure a child feels. Parent behaviour also influences how children learn to relate to pressure, sometimes in ways that surprise parents who thought they were being supportive. This blog looks at what the research actually

Most training sessions are designed to build skill. Fewer are designed to build the capacity to execute that skill under pressure, and the two are not the same thing. A player who can strike the ball perfectly in a quiet, consequence-free drill on a Tuesday. Then can look like a different athlete entirely on match day, not because the skill has disappeared, but because they have never practised deploying it while their nervous system is activated. This blog is about what the

Pressure has a way of finding the gap in your game. You can execute a skill perfectly a hundred times in training, and then the one time it matters most, with the score close, the crowd watching, or a selector in the stands, something changes. Your body feels different. Your thoughts speed up or go quiet in the wrong way. This is not a flaw in your character. It is a predictable psychological and physiological response, and it can be trained. This blog is about what pressure

Recovery from athlete burnout is rarely as simple as taking a break and coming back. Athletes, coaches, and families often expect that a few weeks off will restore motivation and performance, and when it does not, they assume something more is wrong, or they push the athlete back too soon and lose them entirely. The research on burnout recovery is clearer than most people realise, and it points to a process that is structured, gradual, and as much about meaning and identity a

Burnout has become one of the most widely used and least precisely understood terms in sport. Athletes describe themselves as burned out when they are tired, when they are fed up, when they have lost form, when they want a break, or when they are genuinely struggling with a clinical syndrome that requires real intervention. The word covers all of these, and that is part of the problem. If we are going to talk seriously about athlete burnout, we need a clearer understanding of

In some sports, the practice of weighing athletes, sometimes publicly, sometimes weekly, sometimes within hours of competition, is so embedded in the culture that it goes largely unquestioned. Athletes are weighed in front of teammates. Targets are set without clinical input. Acute weight cuts are treated as a rite of passage. And the psychological and physiological consequences of all of this are quietly absorbed by the athletes who carry them. This blog is about the practic

Sport is one of the few environments in which the body is simultaneously a tool, a measurement, and a public statement, observed by coaches, photographed by spectators, compared to teammates, and increasingly broadcast to the world through social media. For most athletes, navigating that is part of the job. For many, it becomes a source of significant distress. Body image in sport is not the same conversation as body image in the general population. The pressures are differen

A guide for coaches and parents around some of the difficulties in approaching care for athletes experiencing eating disorders.

The fitness industry is a beast of an industry with often good intensions. But what happens when the people we are influenced by are portraying disordered eating habits and routines.

Over the past couple months I have completed close to 30 hours of professional development on binge eating disorder (BED), thanks to the ANZAED Autumn workshop series. I have come away from that training with a renewed conviction that this is one of the most underdiagnosed, misunderstood, and inadequately supported conditions in the athlete population and that current trends in weight-loss medication are making the situation more urgent, not less. What Is Binge Eating Disorde

This blog details considerations for coaches of your female athletes.

Understanding the complex dynamics of parents that coach, for parents, youth athletes, and organisations.

Coaches hold enormous influence in an athlete's life. At their best, they shape confidence, build resilience, and ignite a lifelong love of sport. But what happens when a coaching relationship becomes the source of stress rather than support? This blog explores how athletes, parents, and organisations can recognise the warning signs of harmful coaching and what can be done to protect athlete wellbeing without losing sight of growth, skill development, and a love of sport. Und

Earlier this year I had the privilege of co-presenting a webinar series on neuroaffirming interventions in sport with Dr. Samantha McLeod from The SAM Centre, delivered through Sports Medicine Australia and College of Sport & Exercise Psychologists. The conversations that followed, with practitioners, coaches, and athletes, made one thing clear: most of us working in sport have had little to no formal training on neurodiversity, and our systems still expect neurodivergent ath