Mental Strategies of Elite High Altitude Climbers: Overcoming Adversity on Mount Everest

The purpose of this study was to explore the mental strategies used by elite Mount Everest climbers to overcome obstacles while ascending and descending the mountain. Individual interviews were carried out with 10 climbers who have successfully reached the summit of Mount Everest. Common strategies of success were identified, as well as factors that created difficulty on the mountain. The themes of focus, mental toughness, short-term goals, drawing on past experience, connecting to one\u27s body, feeling support from other climbers, and belief in personal capacities were seen to have importance in overcoming adversity on the mountain. These results support mental training as an effective tool for overcoming obstacles in the high stress environment of high altitude climbing

Latent variable modelling of the relationship between flow and exercise-induced feelings: an intuitive appraisal perspective

[Abstract]: The present study examined the relationship between self-reported levels of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) and the post-exercise feelings of Positive Engagement, Revitalisation, Tranquillity, and Physical Exhaustion (Gauvin & Rejeski, 1993) using responses from 1, 231 aerobic dance exercise participants. Vallerand’s (1987) intuitive-reflective appraisal model of self-related affects and Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975) conceptual framework for optimal experience served as the guiding theoretical frameworks. It was hypothesised that self-reported flow would be positively associated with revitalisation, tranquillity and positive engagement while statistical independence was expected for physical exhaustion. First, participants completed the Flow State Scale (Jackson & Marsh, 1996) and second, the Exercise-induced Feeling Inventory (Gauvin & Rejeski, 1993) immediately after an aerobic dance exercise class. Latent variable analyses showed that the higher-order Flow factor was positively associated with post-exercise Positive Engagement, Revitalisation, and Tranquillity, but not with Physical Exhaustion. Flow state explained 35% of the variance in Positive Engagement, 31% of the variance in Revitalisation, and 22% of the variance in Tranquillity. It is concluded that self-reported flow in aerobic dance exercise is moderately associated with the experience of positive post-exercise feelings. Physical educators may wish to employ interventions to facilitate the flow experience during lessons that involve structured exercise