“With the withdrawal of the Games, strength does not run out”: coach Gabrilyan on Lasitskene's motivation and psychological preparation

“Try not to give up”

- Successful performance of an athlete throughout the season implies continuous training. How catastrophic is the sudden break for you?

- For us there is no catastrophe at all. The fact is that at the end of each season I traditionally give Mary a month of absolute relaxation. During this period, she should not even remember about training, or about the sports regimen, or about me, but only take care of herself, her own business: she wants - she gets enough sleep, she wants to - she is resting actively, swimming, sunbathing. I even try not to call her at this time. Well, then, when we meet, the lead-up work begins.

This year the season turned out to be ragged - the March World Cup was canceled. Therefore, immediately after the championship of Russia, I gave her a break, and for about a month now we have been remotely engaged in general physical training.

View this Instagram post

Posted by Maria Lasickene (@ lasitskene.maria) Nov 7, 2019 at 5:14 PST

- But you can’t predict how the situation will develop in the future?

- I can not. Therefore, our plans are constantly being adjusted. Initially, we planned to carry out the full amount of work on the physical conditioning and starting technical training on April 22, because on June 4 we had to jump in Eugene at the Diamond League stage. After the situation changed, we decided to extend the training until the end of April, then again we’ll leave for a month's rest. Starting May 27, we’ll start retracting work. If something else changes, we have one more plan ready. In any case, we will try not to give up.

- Talking about this, you remain very calm. It turns out that there really are no reasons for panic?

- No one. On the contrary, can’t wait to look forward. Honestly, I suppose that entering technical work when it comes to it can be even more interesting than usual. The main thing is not to lose physical condition. Of course, I would like this nightmare to end sooner, so that everything returns to its normal course, so that some kind of clarity appears not only regarding the coronavirus, but also about what will happen next with Russian track and field athletics, with Russian sports in general.

- Where did you originally plan to train? 

- In the same place as usual - in Prokhladny, in Kabardino-Balkaria. This is our hometown, where Masha studied under my guidance from an early school age. There is a small but very good room with good coverage - the republic bought a professional pit especially for us after winning the 2015 World Cup. The enclosed space gives a peculiar feel when running and jumping.

“What were you going to do then?”

- We planned to take up already a finer technical connection to the starts in Moscow, in the track and field athletics arena of CSKA. Firstly, there is very good coverage. Secondly, and most importantly, after a small hall, Masha is much easier to cope with overcoming heights in a large open space.

- That is, it is at this moment that the physical base is laid that allows your athlete to compete in a large number of competitions without prejudice to the result?

- What you are talking about is a matter of not so much a physical as a purely psychological nature. My methodology is generally based on laying the right model of movement in the athlete’s subconscious without using his consciousness. This is where all the complexity lies. This is a specific work, which is built on the principle of "the weaker, the stronger." In other words, the more a person strains, the less his efficiency. It is no accident that the ancient Chinese said: "A relaxed body is a strong body."

“Forbid Masha to even think about movements”

- The famous swimming coach Gennady Turetsky, who was just starting to work with Alexander Popov, spoke about the theory of relaxation and tension.

- All this is well described in biomechanics, but I mean, first of all, the psychology of movement, its ideology. Let me give you a small example. You can simply raise your hand by applying a certain effort to it, that is, execute a conscious model of movement. Or you can submit to an imaginary wind, presenting your hand with a feather. In this case, the movement of the hand is performed out of consciousness and, being repeated many times, lies on the subcortex with a kind of “meme”. This leads to the fact that in a stressful situation, that is, in competitions, consciousness does not become an inhibiting factor for an athlete.

- How did you come to this?

- In an exceptionally practical way, when I started working with Masha. I realized that quite often she does not feel in super uniform, but at the same time, in difficult conditions, unexpectedly for herself, shows a high result. In training, my ward usually jumps no higher than 185 m. And in competitions, this is her initial height. And every time she comes to the start with elements of inner doubt: what if it doesn’t work out? But this doubt is also part of our psychological work. 

- It always seemed to me that an athlete going to the start and all the more to the record should be completely sure that he is able to show this result. And the coach should prepare him precisely for this, and not make him doubt himself. After all, the worst thing for an athlete is not to show the result.

- I absolutely agree with you. And Masha is afraid. But this is a kind of fear. The fact is that in a stressful situation, adrenaline and norepinephrine enter the bloodstream. The athlete's behavior depends on their number and ratio. With severe stress, a person switches on self-defense mechanisms that inhibit effects - this is inherent in us by nature. But when the adrenaline balance changes, the same person begins to work miracles. One jump can jump over a tall fence, climb a steep wall and so on. My task is to recreate this process in a competitive environment. Relatively speaking, I have to give my athlete the ability to jump over the fence, not at all thinking about its height, and not stop in a daze in front of an obstacle. Therefore, I try to build the entire training process bypassing consciousness.  

- You say so, as if it was a question of moving furniture in the room. 

- And there is. You just need to find a way to enter this "room". This is difficult when guided by the traditional understanding of those principles and the conscious psychology in which a person lives and exists. Everything is different with us. For example, I completely excluded ideomotorism from our training ration with Maria, that is, forbade her from even thinking about movements.  

- And how can you forbid a person to think?

- Elementary. I’m building the training so that Masha thinks about the figurative attitudes that I give her. In a way, this is the same example of a wind with a feather, only with respect to jumping motion models. Masha performs installations that, at first glance, are completely unrelated to movement. But as a result, we get exactly what I need. And it turns out beyond the desires of the athlete, outside of her consciousness. She, for example, never ever, and even more so in the process of jumping, does not think about how to pass through the fly leg, although she passes through it in most cases ideally. And this is one of the foundations of the high jump. Here I am knocking on a tree, because I understand: as soon as my athlete begins to think about how she jumps, she will cease to cope with this virtuoso note.

- How is a textbook centipede that couldn’t budge, thinking about which foot it starts to move from?

“Absolutely.” As soon as consciousness turns on, the action stops. But if stress pulls out from a person what lies in his subcortex, everything works more than effectively. 

“And you are always sure of the result?”

- I always worry very much, especially if it is a psychologically difficult start. For example, I was wildly scared when Mary had to take her height at the time of her personal record at the world championships in Beijing in 2015. In anticipation of the start, she lay on her back, about to get up and begin to prepare for the jump. And suddenly one of the rivals, who had already completed her attempt, came close to her and began to dance. I myself was sitting at that moment on the podium, I heard the roar of the stadium, which began to applaud this dance, saw how my athlete closed her ears and eyes, and with all my being I felt the horror that she must experience. At some point, it even seemed that everyone was showing a thumb down, as in the ancient Roman amphitheater: “Kill her!”. I was very scared for Masha. I thought: “Where have I brought her?”

- And she?

- She gets up, takes off the warm-up form, gets on the mark, jumps and wins the World Cup by trying. It was then that I was once again convinced: the greater the fear Masha experiences at the start, the higher the efficiency.

View this Instagram post

Posted by Maria Lasickene (@ lasitskene.maria) Sep 30, 2019 at 10:30 am PDT

- Roughly speaking, do you have to constantly and very much scare your ward? 

- This is a natural process: all our starts are divided into psychological and technical. Psychological ones are those where the stressful situation is great in itself. It is driven by rivals, a high standard, responsibility, a huge army of fans who are waiting for the result, and so on. I call technical tournaments, where athletes compete, who are much inferior to Masha in terms of results. That is, those where the bulk of the jumps are performed alone. No matter how much I talk about responsibility, about the need to show the result, no matter how much my ward tells herself about it, it is impossible to achieve the desired psychological state. And the opposite process takes place: it begins to be constrained, pinched, does not pass through the fly leg fast enough, and as a result, a jump is obtained that is completely not characteristic for it. But, I must say, every year this situation changes: Maria develops an internal ability to fight herself. Another question is that our busy schedule needs to restore neuromuscular connections every time. This is also a specific technical task.

- How do you solve it?

- The artist, who plays super-virtuoso parts every day or sings on stage, inevitably comes a moment when the nervous system ceases to cope with work to the limit: neural connections burn out, and a person begins to break down the accumulated technique. In order to prevent this from happening, the singers have certain methods of singing, and the musicians have special scales and studies that return them the right sensations, restore neuromuscular communication, motor skills. In fact, we are doing the same. I came up with some kind of sketches for the fly leg in the form of small jumps, but with a certain technical setup. Sometimes we perform these exercises immediately after the competition, while the muscles remain hot. And the next start Masha comes out absolutely fresh.

“For us, the Olympics is like a dream”

- Why do you give Lasickens a whole month of rest after the season? 

- To completely clear your head of all unnecessary. Similar to how we format a hard drive in a computer before loading a new system. At the same time, everything necessary remains in the subconscious. Masha knows how to relax.

View this Instagram post

Publication by Maria Lasitskene (@ lasitskene.maria) Apr 4, 2020 at 2:37 pm PDT

“Better yet, as we already found out, she knows how to not load her brains.”

- By the way, returning to the topic that we have already touched upon: in addition to refusing ideomotorism, imitation has completely disappeared from our diet, since with its help an athlete conducts movement through consciousness. There is no visualization either - Masha never looks at herself from the side.

- Why?

- Because otherwise it will fail: a person, as a rule, does not like to look at himself from the side and does not like to hear his voice, because from the inside everyone sees himself in a completely different way. If you start to rebuild yourself in such a way as to please yourself from the outside, you will inevitably begin to break yourself. And I try to keep her inner world as she feels it.

We had a case in 2014 in Oslo, where Masha won the competition, first competing with Anna Chicherova and Blanca Vlašić. When after the competition we walked through the warm-up hall, there on the huge screen we showed her last jump, which, by the way, turned out to be very cool. I stopped and, without any second thought, said: “Look, Manyunya, you are just jumping.” And suddenly she gives me: “Fu-wow, how bad everything is! How slowly it turns out I'm running. "
Well, on that example I once again became convinced of the correctness of the fact that she absolutely did not need to look at herself from the side.

“So you don’t use video at all in your work?”

- I use it constantly both in training and in competitions, but I do it exclusively for myself, for my analysis.

- Forced isolation provokes a person to think much more than he thought in ordinary life. You have no fear that Lasitskene will begin to try to rethink everything that she did before, and this will overwhelm all your settings?

- That's just about this matter, I'm absolutely not worried. I know that Masha will never think about jumping. When we eat, we don’t think how the esophagus works.

“But it's not just about jumping.” Any athlete, training in isolation for several weeks, sooner or later will ask himself the question: "Why do I continue to do this if there is one uncertainty around me?"

- This is really a difficult moment for an athlete. We hope that the uncertainty is temporary, and on the question of how to plan and build the training process in self-isolation, Masha completely trusts me. In addition, she has long been accustomed to working the way I say - she does neither more nor less. Raised so that she doesn’t ask “Why?”, “Why?” or "What's the difference?"

- In your own subconscious, there is no fear that Lasicki wants to end his career? Indeed, for you as a coach, this can to a much greater extent be the end of your professional life.

- I sometimes think about it, but rather from the position that it makes no sense to worry until the time has come - I just can not afford to be distracted by something other than working with Masha. We are already accustomed to permanent responsibility for the result, but nevertheless, when you realize that from success to error there can be only one tiny step taken in the wrong direction, my coaching responsibility increases many times. Especially responsibility to the athlete.  

- How do you manage to keep your student motivated, given that not a single Russian athlete has any confidence in the upcoming Olympic Games?

- Here's the thing: when I was preparing Masha for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, I thought that the problem could be the lack of some qualities, the inadequacy of my own work as a coach, that I could not prepare the athlete for the fight for the podium, give her what is needed to win. But it never occurred to me that the obstacle could be what happened to Russian athletics in general, that we won’t be able to go to the Games at all. In fact, Maria was 100% ready to go to the gold medal - she jumped 2 meters a month before the Olympics. Despite the fact that Spaniard Ruth Beitia won with a result of 197 cm. 

“But the same thing can happen in Tokyo in a year, if the Games do take place.”

- Of course, you can’t call it an excitement, but, you know, it happens in pursuit: one more time, one more time, a little bit more ... We have been going towards this goal for so many years, and now leave everything? No way. After all, everything is very close, you just need to be ready, not give up. For us, the Olympics is like a dream. And most importantly, with its distance, the forces do not run out, but, contrary to everything, are added.

- How many more years is Lasickene able to perform at a high level?

- It is difficult for me to answer this question. She has a family, once she, of course, wants to have children. How everything will look after recovery, no one can accurately predict. But judging by the way Masha now works in the system I invented, she will be able to jump for a very long time.