One of the most important skills any athlete needs to develop if they're going to be successful is the ability to mentally prepare, the ability to turn it on when it's needed, to have that peak performance that they practice for. The problem is, everybody talks about mental preparation, but no one ever tells us how do we really go about doing it.
Well, the problem with that is, everybody is an individual. I can tell you some of lead athletes, actually Olympic medal winners I worked up, one would go off for 20 minutes and these people are in the same sport and she would just her eyes and visualize and need to be by herself.
The other one would take 20 minutes at the top of the hill and joke and tell jokes and goof around, and then head like a 90 second laser beam total focus and they both were very successful but got there through very different ways. But the secret was they both knew what worked for them. They had a mental preparation routine and they adhered to it, especially when the pressure was on.
Well, how can we do this? Well, here is what you need to do. I want you to think of the day of a competition for you. Now sports depend, some sports you might have more than one like a wrestler, you might wrestle three times in a tournament one day, or a swimmer, might swim a couple of times, other sports you just-basketball you play once a day typically.
But think of what's typical for you, the hour before competition or it might be a couple of hours. Take a notepad for me and write your general physical warm up. What do you generally do to get ready, what stretches do you do? How much do you run around, do you take a shoot around if you're a basketball player? Do you go, do some stretching if you're a runner, a swimmer; do you go into the practice pool if you're a swimmer? What do you do in your sport generally for a physical warm up? So jot that down.
Now, what do you generally as a psychological warm up? Are you the kind of person that needs to imagine yourself performing? The great baseball hitter Hank Aaron used to 24 hours before competing, used to visualize himself against all the pitchers that he would face. Other people don't do that, other people find that they go crazy if they do that and they need to distract themselves, watch TV, do other things until the time is right for them. What do you do generally, psychologically to get ready, think about that a second, jot that down.
Great! Now that takes us in a general way, let's go to little more specific. Five or ten minutes before you're going to go out and compete. What do you do generally in a physical sense? Do you do certain stretches? Are you a up runner around? Do you sit by yourself with a towel over your head, depending on the sport? What do you need to be doing? Do you like talking to your coach? Do you like being off by yourself? Well, that ties to kind of the physical to the mental bridge, but for right now what do we do physically, write that down.
Finally, what do we do mentally. As I started to say, you might be doing the stretches and talking to your coach, you might be doing visualization, maybe do some breathing that kind of relax, what do you do mentally to get ready, maybe you're in a combat sport and you have to get yourself psyched up and fired up. Write down what you generally do.
Okay, good! So, on your list now you have four real categories, general physical warm up, general psychological warm up, a specific psychological warm up and a specific physical warm up. You've got those four written out in front of you. Now just take a second and check and think of your best performances. Did you tend to do those things consistently?
If that's the case, what you want to do is get into the habit like great Olympians do, great professional athletes, they warm up mentally and physically the same way before every competition. Try to get that routine down so you have the same routine each time. Actually, you can do that in practice, mentally for practice to see if that works, then try it in a competition.
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