Winning and Losing
Terrie Schauer
Kick-boxing is a competitive sport and tends to revolve around matches where athletes win or lose. I'm struggling to find an effective and balanced way to deal mentally with winning and losing in fight preparation.
I just fought in the qualifying (Provence) tourament for the French Full-contact championship and am following/assisting some up-coming fighters through their first events in the next few weeks. Winning and losing is on the table a lot.
My question is this: in combat arts a lot goes into focus on winning or dominating. A win is often a yard-stick by which athletes feel their "worth" as boxers. Losses become hard to deal with. Many athletes give up after a first loss. Even more advanced boxers have trouble bouncing back from a loss, because losing seems to invalidate the hard work and sacrifice that goes into training (i.e. dieting to make a weight class, running, training almost every day).
Can anyone think of a good way of framing this issue -- that boxing is on some level about competition and winning, but that this really isn't a good way of measuring the progress, learning, etc. that is part of the process of practicing a sport.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Terrie Schauer
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Terrie Schauer
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