The Mental Game

 

In any realm of athletic performance, we tend to look at the tangibles. How strong, fast, agile is someone? What does their movement profile look like? And in the CrossFit space, this especially makes sense given that we can train all of these things and there is a direct link to performance in the sport compared to football or baseball where strength is less correlated to output.

The thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that the mental aspect of competing is what truly separates those athletes who perform to their potential and those who consistently fall apart. I think about mental performance as four main pillars although you could certainly expand upon this as needed or desired. The pillars are Attention, Anxiety, Adversity Response and Confidence. By improving these four things, I believe that an athlete has greatly increased the likelihood that they will have success in the sport.

Attention

Attention is the first pillar because I believe that everything else is entirely dependent upon attention. The ability to control our focus allows everything else to fall into place.

The most common fault that I see in this realm is focusing on the wrong thing. Athletes get into a competition or into a workout and focus on the outcomes rather than the process. This means that they are more concerned about what is happening around them or what their time is going to be rather than staying present in the moment. When this happens, simple mistakes create dramatic shifts in the leaderboard, ironically harming the thing that they were fixated on.

Most people call this choking, but in reality it’s just misplaced attention. They let the perception of other peoples’ judgement or their stress about the performance get in the way of focusing on executing to the best of their ability. Training the mind to snap out of intrusive thoughts and stay present makes all the difference in the world.

 

Anxiety

Anyone who has competed is familiar with anxiety. Many athletes who struggle to perform try to remove this sensation before competition, but I would argue that this is not productive. Instead we should be concerned about managing the timing and reframing the meaning of our anxiety response.

What I see most of the time is that athletes spend the entire week leading into a competition with a heavy anxiety response. This typically manifests in elevated heart rate, short and shallow breaths, tight chest, temperature regulation issues. They spend so much time in this state that they are exhausted from the cost of living in the fight or flight response. This means that there is nothing left to convert into competitive fuel for game day.

Ultimately, we want to harness that energy to drive performance. The key is how we frame out perspective around those physical sensations. The butterflies that you experience show you care and it’s something that we can ride to faster paces that we normally can achieve with less effort. Learning to properly employee those butterflies while ensuring that we aren’t on fumes creates a massive performance boost.

Train your brain to interpret adrenaline as excitement, not a threat.

 

Adversity response

Everyone has experienced failure. As athletes, we have the unique pleasure of doing it on a public platform, which increases the perceived stakes of failure. The thing that I see separating the people who allow one bad event to spiral into a bad weekend and athletes who can still thrive is the ability to process and move beyond negative outcomes.

Often times I see athletes respond to adversity with anxiety and starting to create labels about themselves. Things like “I choke” or now my support group is going to be disappointed in me. Even though we have all been on the other side of that equation and know it’s not true, we have a tendency to create a negative response. Then anything that starts to look like an opportunity for failure sends us spiraling. If we continue to allow this, we reach a point of being burned out, which is simply the brains defense mechanism. We stop trying hard because the pressure is unbearable and the void of effort gives us a built in excuse for failure.

“Never permit the pressure to exceed the pleasure.”

-            Joe Maddon

Breaking this pattern requires a mindset shift. Failure is informative if we allow it to be. It gives us the data on the gap between where we currently are and where we want to be. The athlete who can learn to do that without attaching an identity narrative to it is an athlete who is set up to succeed

 

Confidence and Self Belief

We often think about the loudest person in the room as the most confident. In reality, that is usually insecurity manifesting. This is an athlete who is faking it until they make it. Real confidence doesn’t need to announce itself because the performance will announce it for them.

Genuine self-belief is much more subtle. It’s a feeling that you are able to execute when it counts. It comes from accumulating evidence over time that you can do hard things, that you've done hard things, and that you're in the process of doing thing that continue to push those boundaries.

 

How to Improve These Four Pillars

The brain is a predictive operating system. We are always seeking patterns so that we can make better predictions in the future. Therefore, we need to be aware that all self talk is data that our brain is using to model future events.

Negative self talk, isn’t just about the tax on your emotions. It is quite literally wiring your to expect an underperformance. The athlete who says I am not good at running has  close the loop and made this a fixed thing. We can change that entire narrative with one word: “Yet”. By choosing this word, we have opened the loop and allow space for growth. We know we aren’t where we want to be but we are signaling to our brain and body that we are capable of improving.

Similarly, we need to be very intentional about how we label ourselves as athletes. Labels become an identity that we will gravitate to. Thus we need to choose honest but intentionally directional labels such as “I am a hard worker” or “I am a process oriented athlete.” This gives us something to cling to when things might be going sideways. It gets us back to our north star which allows us to be more productive quicker.

As we work on these things, we have to expect that progress is going to be smaller than we want it to be in the near term but that this effort is worth it in the long term. There may seem like a breakthrough or light bulb moment, but those moments aren’t possible if we don’t lay the foundation for it to happen.

Often times that change is going to be more qualitative than tangible in your scores. You start to notice that there are less intrusive thoughts and that your overall attention is better inside of the workout. The thoughts might stay more positive in general with things like “keep pushing” or “I can do this”. Those thoughts start to turn into bigger sets, smaller rests, faster paces which climbs up the leaderboard.

 

My Own Journey

I showed up to college coming from a strong high school program where I was a three year starter. I expected to show up and start as a freshman with immediate performance on the field. Instead, I sat my entire freshman year. So I retooled my swing, got stronger, got faster and came back a much better athlete.

Sophomore year started the roller coaster. Stretches of success, stretches of failure followed by sitting on the bench. Compounding this with my tendency to get injured left me playing guarded. I didn’t want to play too care free because a mistake would get me on the bench and too much aggressive would potentially leave me injured. So I played passively… the same way I played early on in my high school career. I wanted to avoid mistakes rather than chasing success.

I then overhauled my mindset at the plate going into my junior year. I shifted to hunting pitches to do damage on. I learned which pitches were in my sweet spot and learned how to observe the other pitcher to figure out what was most likely to see to dictate the approach. But I was still in a cycle of two consecutive bad games putting me on the bench. So while the process got better, it was still hard to fully believe in it.

Senior year, the break through happened. The worst on paper performance of my career. I struck out in my first at bat of the game fair and square. Second at bat I had three consecutive calls that were really bad and resulted in me striking out again followed by getting pulled from the game for not swinging. That was the moment that I realized even by playing it safe, things weren’t safe. I had zero control over what happened away from what I controlled and I was spending my time worrying about it. So I started focusing on maximizing performance every day I showed up to the park. 

This mindset has allowed me to perform in CrossFit, marathons and Hyrox. I know that mid race, I don’t need to be concerned about my lunge split because that is what it is, instead I need to think about executing the movement to the best of my ability and maximizing performance for the entire race. It gives me the ability to lock in on specific and stay focused on performing the movement to standard. It’s how I leave these races knowing that even if I didn’t have my best day, I am performing the best that I can on that day. And if it wasn’t my best day, I know that I have a system to improve upon.

 

Final Thoughts

Mental performance isn’t a sometimes thing. This is something that we need to practice year-round. It is coachable and trainable and it might be the biggest untapped aspect of competing for most athletes. If you know that any of these things impacts you, that means there is room for growth and a clear path for improvement. Start with intention to change. After you set your intention, turn to guiding your attention and language. This will dictate your adversity response and self-confidence.  Remember that the brain is very malleable, but you have to choose to mold it into the shape you want it to take.