Extreme Balance: Paradoxical Principles That Make You a Champion

Extreme Balance translates sports psychology into understandable terms. As a parent of an elite athlete, I appreciate the guidance and validation the authors provide. More abstract ideas are explained with clear language and illustrations making the topic easy to understand. The authors seamlessly include many references to research but manage to keep the reading enjoyable.Loved it!

What a great concept! Very well written! Highly recommended! For the athletes that want to go from good to great!

From here on out, Extreme Balance will be my gift of choice to anyone aspiring to up their game, whether on the field, court, mat, pool, or simply in life. There is inspiration and insight in each of the book's 12 chapters.The authors of this well-written book have packed compelling wisdom about athletic excellence into a volume of less than 200 pages. In so doing, they've created a readily accessible guidebook for winning, lessons from which will live in the mind of readers long after the final page is turned.

This book is written for athletes — and anyone else who wants to better understand competition, teamwork, individual achievement and themself. This is a well-written book (hurray!) that will change how you approach the mental part of the game, even if you are only sitting in the bleachers.

So many self help and psych books preach a way you need to approach life, an endeavor, a sport, and art. This work acknowledges the complexity of working toward excellence and acknowledges that there are no secret recipes. Yet, it does offer a practical framework to approach the often duality of approaches we are offered as solutions -( e.g. always be on the offense vs defense wins games.

Was recommended this book by a friend and totally helped my mindset while training for my first Ironman. Highly recommend!

The concept of mental toughness is over simplified by most coaches and athletes. This book breaks down the basic concepts by helping the reader understand the yin-yang of the most important and necessary components of the mental processes involved in preparing for competition.

Extreme Balance is a timely book to read following the ’24 Summer Olympics. How did the top-3 athletes become world-class? Talent and skill? The right kind of body? Superior coaching? Laser-like discipline and mental toughness? Yes, all these matter, but according to the three authors of Extreme Balance, there’s even more.They speak with one voice to emphasize that there aren’t any shortcuts to getting good, let alone better or best. They fully support the claim that it takes at least 10,000 hours to develop a basic mastery of any skill sets. Intelligently-guided practice, practice, and more practice is essential. Further, they believe that sheer passion for a specific sport is more than enough reason to pursue it as far as one is capable. But of highest importance is the ability to master one’s “head game”.A pithy quote from basketball coach Tim Stoke reminds us: “Hard work beats talent, until talent decides to work hard.” Absolutely, you have to be talented and work hard, but the authors repeatedly note how developing and employing a balanced mindset in all aspects of training and competition enables a competitor to overcome opponents who may be faster, bigger or more skillfully-trained. Among their best advice: to be prepared for anything but to always expect the unexpected. Just as significant as knowing your opponents’ strengths and weaknesses is knowing your own, and training to develop and improve on both.Assuming you possess ‘the whole package’ needed to compete in your chosen sport (which must include a certain level of financial support, to be fair), the authors ask you to be clear: what’s the price of admission you’re willing to pay in order to win? Extreme Balance gives no easy answers here. Sometimes the advice even sounds simplistic. In chapter 4, the concept of Deliberate Practice is: 1) Have a goal, 2) Endure the drudgery of training, 3) Get good feedback. Chapters 5-9 vividly illustrate how the application of “extremism in pursuit of virtue is no vice”; meaning pursue excellence in your chosen sport by always giving 100% or more. Easier said than done! Most athletes know the experience of “hitting a brick wall”. You could make the case that sometimes you hit a brick wall in order to learn how much you really want something; brick walls are there to be overcome. Our pursuit of excellence—and failures along the way—ultimately makes us what we are. Once committed, don’t hold anything back, but obviously don’t expect to be an overnight sensation. Play the long game. Understand how to prevent your burning passion from turning into an unhealthy obsession or burning you out.Most importantly, the core chapters emphasize that you must seek out and listen carefully to good feedback, even from your opponents. As you learn from your losses, balance out your worst, most emotional impulses. In a Classical sense, they’re reminding the reader of the timeless values of prudence and temperance, which are just as important as going full speed ahead without regards for the consequences. As they state in Chapter 2: “The Problem With Extremism”: Tough/Smart beats Tough/Stupid. This kind of common sense throughout the book wisely discriminate between embracing the healthy levels of anxiety necessary for real growth and avoiding the more toxic, self-destructive levels of excess in pursuit of illusions of successTraining, discipline, focus, goal-orientation, delayed gratification, constant improvement, best performances under pressure: these are all attributes of a successful athlete, as well as any successful human being. The best parts of the book illustrate a sports-as-training-for-life thesis, in which the authors emphasize the most useful choices are not based on the duality of either/or. Instead, they’re better understood as but/and, as in being strong but flexible, or having speed and endurance. By analogy, a truly actualized person, athlete or not, is neither ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’, but ‘whole-brained’, capable of drawing strengths from opposites and employing these qualities depending on the requirements of the task at hand.At a sport’s highest levels, the authors believe the best athletes self-consciously critique themselves while training to better perform at their peak. In competition, however, these athletes metamorphose. They’re not thinking at all but only acting unconsciously, without a sense of self, in a complete abandonment to ‘the flow’ of performance. The outcome takes care of itself. Parallel concepts to this mental paradox can be found in the 1948 book Zen In The Art Of Archery by Eugen Herrigel or Tim Gallwey’s 1974 book The Inner Game Of Tennis. More immediately, one can’t help but think of Simone Biles bravely withdrawing during the 2020 Olympics after realizing she had the “Twisties”, losing her ability to detach from her performance.Extreme Balance is not without a few contradictions, as one would expect from a book of this title. One such example is the chapter 11 story of wrestler Yianni Diakomihalis, who tore an ACL while competing in the NCAA championship quarter-finals. He chose to continue, despite the obvious pain and serious risks, and somehow went on to win his first of four NCAA finals in his weight class. His story is used to emphasize the idea that “champions are tough”, “doing what it takes to win”. What about lucky? The rest of the chapter is more cautious about pain, quoting Stanford doctor Anna Leake on the need to distinguish between good and bad pain, to respect what your body tells you, and to get sound medical advice about what to do next. Yet even she refers to “(experiencing) the optimal amount of pain…in your body, to realize its most amazing, awe-inspiring potential.” The rest of the chapter argues forcefully for ‘knowing oneself’ and one’s pain tolerance, recognizing that permanent damage can result from ignoring it. So when does pushing oneself to perfection become purely masochistic? How do you avoid becoming delusional about your ability and potential to succeed? The text clearly states that pushing past such physical and mental pains is best reserved for college-level competitors and above. The 16-year-old Olympic medalist is an extreme exception!Extreme Balance provides any serious athlete with some necessary perspectives on the overwrought sports mythology permeating our competitive culture. Amateur or professional athletes who are active in high-contact physical sports and wish to improve their mental game seem like the best audiences for this book. These sports include football, wrestling, boxing, mixed martial arts, soccer and lacrosse. However, there are just as many lessons for anyone involved in non-contact solo and team sports like track and field, weight-lifting, cycling or swimming (I’d place baseball somewhere in between!). Even if you’re not an athlete, the motivational psychology found throughout the book should prove quite useful.The thoughtful closing chapter 12 provides an extremely helpful summary guide, and incorporates a chart with the different, opposing behaviors or mindsets that are the subjects of previous chapters. This offers a practical, clear outline to chart one’s own development of physical and mental balance. If used honestly, this guide can help one understand when new strategies must be employed to enable growth or achieve one’s highest potential. The book’s concluding header will make you smile broadly: “Sports As A Preparation For Life Except When Its Not”. For all of this and more, Extreme Balance is well worth the purchase.