The Right Kind of Hard: Why Great Coaches Create Difficulty on Purpose

Mikel Arteta is the manager of Arsenal Football Club and one of the most respected coaches in world soccer. A former professional player and Arsenal captain, Arteta later worked alongside Pep Guardiola at Manchester City before taking over at Arsenal in 2019. Since then, he has become known for his attention to detail, preparation and ability to build a strong team culture.

So when Arteta talks about how he prepares athletes for adversity, I pay attention.

Recently, he described an approach that caught my attention from a sports psychology perspective.

He intentionally makes things harder for his players.

Meals get delayed. Travel plans change. Dressing rooms become uncomfortable. Players are exposed to unexpected disruptions that force them to adjust rather than simply follow the plan.

At first glance, you might think:

Why would a coach intentionally make things more difficult for his players?

From a sports psychology perspective, there is actually a pretty compelling reason.

It's called a desirable difficulty.

The concept is relatively simple: if we only practice in comfortable, predictable environments, we can become very good at performing when everything goes according to plan.

But sport rarely goes according to plan.

The referee makes a bad call.

The opponent changes its defensive scheme.

You miss your first three shots.

You get benched.

The crowd gets loud.

You don't feel physically great.

Your teammate makes a mistake.

The game doesn't look anything like you expected.

The question isn't whether athletes will experience disruption.

They will.

The question is whether we've prepared them to respond to it.

Research around desirable difficulties suggests that appropriately challenging conditions can improve learning, retention, adaptability and the ability to perform when circumstances become less than ideal.

The important word is appropriately.

Because there is a big difference between creating difficulty and creating chaos.

And there is another piece of this that I believe is just as important as the difficulty itself:

The athlete has to trust the person creating it.

Difficulty Without Trust Feels Like Punishment

Imagine two coaches doing the exact same thing.

Coach A intentionally makes practice harder. Maybe the team is put into an uncomfortable situation, given less information, or forced to solve a problem they weren't expecting.

The players think:

"Coach is trying to prepare us for something."

Coach B does the exact same thing.

The players think:

"Coach is messing with us."

Same drill.

Same difficulty.

Completely different psychological experience.

Why?

Connection.

When athletes know that their coach cares about them, believes in them and is invested in their development, discomfort is much more likely to be interpreted as preparation.

Without that relationship, the same behavior can feel like punishment, manipulation or a power trip.

And I think this is an important distinction for coaches who hear about concepts like desirable difficulty and immediately want to implement them.

You can't skip the relationship and go straight to the adversity.

Connection isn't separate from performance.

Connection is what allows athletes to receive difficult coaching.

I've spent a lot of time around athletes and coaches, and one thing continues to stand out to me:

Athletes will tolerate a lot from a coach they know genuinely cares about them.

They will run the harder drill.

They will accept the uncomfortable conversation.

They will respond to accountability.

They will allow themselves to be pushed outside their comfort zone.

Not because they enjoy being uncomfortable.

Because they trust the person asking them to be uncomfortable.

That distinction matters.

The message becomes:

"This person is making me uncomfortable because they are preparing me, not because they are against me."

That's a completely different psychological experience.

The Goal Isn't Discomfort

This is where coaches can get the concept wrong.

The goal isn't discomfort.

The goal is adaptability.

We're not trying to see how much frustration an athlete can tolerate.

We're trying to teach them that their response doesn't have to be dictated by the circumstances.

Arteta's approach is essentially about teaching players to expect the unexpected.

If something disrupts their routine, the goal isn't to panic or complain.

The goal is to recognize the disruption, adapt and continue preparing to perform.

That is mental preparation.

Don't just prepare athletes for the game you hope happens.

Prepare them for the game that actually happens.

We Should Practice the Unexpected

One of the biggest mistakes we make in sport is preparing athletes almost exclusively for ideal conditions.

We practice the offense exactly as designed.

We rehearse the free throw routine exactly the same way.

We walk through the play.

We study the opponent.

We know the schedule.

Everything is organized.

And then we expect athletes to magically become adaptable when something unexpected happens.

But adaptability is a skill.

And skills need to be practiced.

Maybe that means occasionally adding crowd noise.

Maybe it means changing the constraints of a drill.

Maybe it means forcing an athlete to make decisions while fatigued.

Maybe it means taking away some information and requiring them to solve the problem.

Maybe it means changing the plan halfway through practice.

Maybe it means intentionally putting them into situations where the first solution doesn't work.

The point isn't to make practice miserable.

The point is to create meaningful challenges that resemble the demands athletes will eventually face.

The Best Coaches Don't Remove Every Obstacle

This is one of the hardest things for coaches and parents to understand.

Sometimes helping an athlete means removing an obstacle.

Sometimes helping an athlete means letting them experience the obstacle.

We can become so focused on protecting athletes from failure, frustration and discomfort that we accidentally remove opportunities for them to develop the very skills they'll eventually need.

If a player struggles, our instinct can be to immediately fix it.

If they're frustrated, we make it easier.

If they fail, we explain why.

If they don't know what to do, we give them the answer.

But sometimes the better response is:

"What are you going to do now?"

That's where development happens.

Not because struggle is inherently good.

But because productive struggle creates an opportunity to adapt.

The athlete learns:

"I can figure this out."

"I can stay composed when things don't go my way."

"I don't need everything to be perfect to perform."

"I can respond."

That's resilience.

But Don't Confuse Resilience With Bad Coaching

This is where I would put a big asterisk on the entire conversation.

We should never use "mental toughness" or "desirable difficulties" as an excuse for poor coaching.

There is nothing psychologically sophisticated about constantly yelling at athletes, humiliating them, creating unnecessary uncertainty or making them miserable.

That's not necessarily resilience training.

Sometimes it's just poor leadership.

The difference is intent, relationship and dosage.

A purposeful challenge has a reason.

The coach knows what psychological or performance skill they're trying to develop.

The challenge is appropriate for the athlete.

And there is enough trust in the relationship that the athlete can interpret the difficulty as development rather than rejection.

That's coaching.

Connection Makes Challenge Possible

This might actually be the biggest takeaway for me from Arteta's approach.

Don't create difficulty before you've created connection.

Before you intentionally disrupt an athlete's comfort, the athlete needs to know who you are.

They need to know that you care.

They need to know that you believe in them.

They need to know that accountability isn't personal.

They need to know that your standards aren't about controlling them.

They're about preparing them.

Arteta's success is not evidence that coaches should simply start making their athletes uncomfortable.

It's an example of something much bigger:

Elite preparation isn't always about making things easier to execute. Sometimes it's about making athletes better at responding when things aren't easy.

And that requires trust.

Prepare the Athlete, Not Just the Performance

Ultimately, this is why I like what Arteta is doing.

Not because every coach should start delaying meals or making dressing rooms uncomfortable.

But because the philosophy is bigger than the tactic.

Don't wait for adversity to teach adaptability.

Create opportunities to practice it.

Don't wait for pressure to teach composure.

Create situations where athletes have to practice regulating themselves.

Don't wait for something to go wrong before teaching the next response.

Teach athletes that something going wrong is simply another moment requiring a response.

And perhaps most importantly:

Don't create difficulty before you've created connection.

The best coaches don't simply make athletes tougher.

They create environments where athletes learn that they can handle hard things.

There is a difference.

One is about control.

The other is about development.

Because ultimately, we aren't trying to create athletes who need perfect conditions to perform.

We're trying to create athletes who can say:

"This isn't what I expected.

But I'm still here.

So what's next?"