Many concepts attempt to explain how individuals sustain effort in the face of challenging circumstances. Researchers and coaches frequently reference terms like grit, mental toughness, self-control, and resilience when discussing performance under adversity.
While each concept offers unique insights, their overlapping attributes often make them difficult to differentiate. This overlap can lead to confusion, particularly when debating how these factors contribute to success or when applying them in real-world coaching settings.
In 2023, Adam Biggs of the Naval Surface Forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet, and colleagues from Naval Special Warfare Command introduced a novel framework in The Journal of General Psychology. Their framework unifies multiple psychological constructs under the metaphor of a psychological battery, focusing on grit and hardiness as key contributors to sustained goal-directed behavior and individual success.
Adapting this concept for rowing and coaching, we can envision a psychological battery where grit and mental toughness represent the maximum charge of the battery—essentially, how long an individual can sustain effort.
Grit and mental toughness share many core features, such as perseverance, but they differ in their roles in stress management time-wise. Grit can be defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” while mental toughness refers to “perseverance in a goal-directed pursuit in the present moment.”
Both physiological and psychological stress drain the battery. The larger your battery, the more stress you can handle before depleting your reserves.
The video below describes how this all works.
The exciting part? Research shows that, while influenced by genetics, grit and mental toughness are also learnable and teachable. However, broad mental skills training can fall short if it doesn’t clearly convey the contexts in which these strategies should be applied.
The concept of a psychological battery provides a practical framework for understanding how grit, mental toughness, self-control, and resilience interrelate. By designing training approaches grounded in this model, we can enhance athletes’ psychological endurance—helping them train more effectively, recover more quickly, and manage race-day stress with confidence. These improvements not only accelerate physiological gains but also give athletes the tools they need to race faster and perform at their best.
- Biggs et al. 2023. “Psychological Endurance: How Grit, Resilience, and Related Factors Contribute to Sustained Effort despite Adversity.” The Journal of General Psychology, Sept, 1–43.
- Denovan et al. 2023. “Examining What Mental Toughness, Ego Resiliency, Self-Efficacy, and Grit Measure: An Exploratory Structural Equation Modelling Bifactor Approach.” Current Psychology 42 (26): 22148–63.