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Before Stephen Walker (PhDEdu’84), pictured above, founded a premier , and before his counseling helped athletes like Olympic runner Kara Grgas-Wheeler Goucher (Psych’01) achieve athletic greatness, he was a self-described gym rat at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s Carlson Gymnasium who wandered into his future while looking for a restroom.

It was the early 1980s, and Walker was working on his doctorate in counseling psychology. One day, while looking for a bathroom after a pickup basketball game, he happened upon ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s Human Performance Laboratory, a warren of treadmills, workstations with microscopes, balloons to measure oxygen intake and other equipment used to conduct physical assessments for athletes, firefighters, police and other professionals.

“[Founder and integrative physiology professor emeritus] Art Dickinson came out and asked, ‘Can I help you?’ ” says Walker, 61. “I said, ‘I was looking for a restroom. But now that I’m here, what is this place?’ ”

The chance encounter led Walker to his life’s work, including a 19-year relationship with the Human Performance Laboratory.

“It was very, very eye-opening for me to be looking at that body-mind-spirit aspect of performance and stress management,” says Walker, a former football player and swimmer at Cherry Creek High School in Denver. “That really set the stage for me going forward.”

Reduced stress and exercise

At ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Walker devoted his thesis to the effect of various treatments, such as meditation and physical exercise, on people’s physical and emotional stress levels. He found that aerobic exercise significantly decreased muscular tension and found that stress-management training led to reductions in emotional symptoms of stress, with people in that group reporting improved sleep and less disruptive mental chatter.

In 1981 he founded the Rocky Mountain Institute for Health and Performance, an interdisciplinary practice in downtown Boulder that included his own private practice, plus other like-minded stress management specialists, a psychiatrist, nutritionist, massage therapist interns, a licensed counselor, a complete biofeedback lab and REST (Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy) chamber, among other resources. The organization designed award-winning wellness programs for employees of such local companies as Ball Aerospace. Walker and his colleagues also taught outreach classes through ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s Division of Continuing Education that ranged from mini-classes to full-credit courses in the education school.

Alan Goldberg, a Massachusetts sports psychology consultant, says Walker’s method of considering more than just the behavior surrounding an athlete’s performance sets him apart from others in the field.

“He looks at the athlete as a whole person, beyond just teaching conscious skills like relaxation techniques,” Goldberg says. “That separates him from the vast majority of sports psychologists in the country.”

Clearing the mind

This can be especially helpful for athletes like gymnasts who can suffer from blocks in which they find themselves unable to perform skills that were once second nature, Goldberg says.

“Our bodies memorize trauma and when a gymnast gets hurt, has a close call or sees someone else get hurt, the body goes into a self-protective response,” Goldberg says. “[Walker] subscribes to the idea that a lot of performance problems are trauma-based, so it’s important to look at anything in an athlete’s history that may have been physically or emotionally upsetting.”

It’s a method that has proven successful for professional athletes, such as Adam Goucher (Comm’98) and Kara Grgas-Wheeler Goucher (Psych’01), both former ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ NCAA track and cross country champions who train in Oregon.

Grgas-Wheeler Goucher says dealing with issues from her childhood during her sessions with Walker eventually led her to “actually start to care about running again” after a long slump.

“In 2006, when I had a huge breakthrough year, I was working with him,” she says. “I finally had the ability to focus on running because I had dealt with all these other things.”

Walker says it’s simply a matter of remembering that “professional athletes have problems like everyone else. If they experience stress from those problems, it can distract them and take them out of the game. Every athlete I work with, I work with as a person first.”

Paving the way to performance

In 2006 he took his sports-psychology tips national when he founded, an online magazine about applied sports psychology research written in lay terms for athletes, coaches and parents. The site nets 500 to 600 visits daily, plus 6,500 readers who subscribe to its RSS feed.

That’s in addition to the private practice and consulting firm, , that Walker largely runs out of an office in his Niwot, Colo., home, where he lives with his wife and two sons. Walker founded the firm in 1997, after Rocky Mountain Institute for Health and Performance dissolved and he suffered a heart attack. He says genetics and increased stress from managed health-care reforms and changes in the economics of mental health care led to his heart attack.

Walker took his own stress-management advice in setting up Health and Sport Performance Associates, building a relaxed, natural environment for treating goal-oriented clients — many of them professional athletes, as well as younger, gifted athletes. He has hands-on tools for goal setting and stress management that include a nature walk, a climbing wall and a 9-foot-high balance beam.

Walker never lost his own love of athletics and is an expert skier and a 10-handicap golfer who has run 31 Bolder Boulder 10K races.

“I think I’ve always known on some level that the mental game, especially the athlete’s ability to relax and manage stress, is critical in athletic performance,” he says. “I’ve always been very interested in finding out what it is that enables people to manage stress effectively so they can perform well and be the best they can be.”

Advice for weekend warriors

You don’t have to be a professional athlete to benefit from Stephen Walker’s sports psychology tips. He suggests the following for weekend warriors looking to stay motivated during training or relaxed on race day.

1. Train with a partner. Walker says this is a tried-and-true motivation tip for a reason. “[It] distributes the motivation, so it’s not all on one person,” he says. “And you feel a responsibility to your team or group rather than just yourself.” Plus,” he says, “it makes time spent doing hard work fly by.”

2. Appreciate the benefits. “Look at the reasons you work out,” Walker says. “For many active people, fitness in and of itself is reinforcement.” Appreciate the byproducts of living a healthy lifestyle — a more positive attitude, more energy and the way you look and feel in clothes.”

3. Develop a dashboard. Walker advises athletes to scroll through a mental checklist during a race or event. “Athletes at every level can benefit from rotating through a mental list: How’s my form? How’s my rhythm and tempo? How’s my breathing? How’s my arm work?” he says.

4. Be as relaxed as possible on race day. “Look around,” he says. “Wave to people you recognize. Put a smile on your face. Drink it in and have fun.”

Amy Reinink (Jour’02) is an award-winning freelance writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Runner’s World and Women’s Running.

Photo by Andrea Fabri (top)