The Art of Mastering Your Mind: Mental Training for Pro Sports

When the topic of sports comes up, you might not immediately think about the mental preparation needed to become the best. Physical preparation and technical training are a huge part of the process. The intricate relationship an athlete’s body has with its mind takes plenty of patience, practice and nurturing. 

In this article, we delve into the impact that your subconscious has on the way you act physically and the ways that you can train your mind to your benefit.

Visualise What You Want To Do

One of the best ways to harness the power of your mind is to visualise exactly what your goal is and to see yourself achieving it. By visualising success, the mental images create a brilliant rehearsal to prepare the mind for the challenge that awaits.

Mental imagery provides the body with a variety of scenarios, allowing athletes to prepare, rehearse and refine. Imaging the path to success, whether it be aiming for a target or vaulting over a height, creates neural highways that the body can then revisit when it comes down to the actual moment.

Priming your mind is a helpful way to prepare for success. This will also boost your confidence and activate many other much-needed triggers for a successful performance.

Perceptions of Control

Whether it be from a coach, family member, competitor or yourself, sport involves an immense amount of perceived pressure. Place anything under enough pressure, without the appropriate tools to cope, and you’ll begin to see it crack.

The stress and anxiety all athletes experience is to be expected. Heightened arousal can actually benefit performance but elevated too far can cause nervousness and distress, and threaten performance. Elite athletes at the top of their game deal with high-stakes competitions that require an impressive amount of mental control and stability.

Those who do manage to develop healthy coping mechanisms will be able to achieve their optimal performance capacity and face the intense pressure head-on. They might even thrive in such situations even if nobody can observe the discomfort they are feeling inside.

Ways of practising mental self-control can be as simple as meditation in the mornings or deep-breathing exercises at the end of the day. Each athlete will have their own routine, but the key is to take some time alone with your mind and learn to harness any doubt or anxiety. Sit with it. Become familiar with how you respond. You control your actions, your thoughts and feelings don’t control you.

Find Your Focus

With some sports, concentration is everything. Chess requires players to think of nothing but the game and which formula of moves will find them the win. Training one’s brain to focus on nothing but the task at hand at the right moment takes practice and skill. The ability to focus whilst there are distractions around is what separates the average from the great.

Staying present will allow your body to immerse itself fully in the act and achieve an excellent line of unspoken communication between the body and mind. Being in contact with the present moment indicates to your body that it’s time to perform.

The Masters

The world’s biggest sporting stage often evokes a sense of pressure and can offer a lot of distractions. Many athletes will remain seemingly ‘antisocial’ for the duration of their stay to maintain their focus and minimise distraction. In reality, they are simply doing what needs to be done and making sensible choices that prioritise performance.

By scheduling visualisation, practising mindfulness and remaining focused on the competition, these elite performers can achieve incredible outcomes.

Maintaining a rigorous physical and mental regime will help you achieve what you desire. Sport Psychologists are trained specifically to help high-stakes athletes develop a mental training programme and talk through any stresses or anxieties that may exist. Just as important, is to focus on your strengths and the things that you do amazingly well. How can you turn them into super-strengths and give yourself a massive advantage over your opposition?

Learning to embrace a challenge and immerse yourself in the pressure will allow the body and the mind to intertwine and perform optimally.

Conclusion

In the fast-paced world of sports, the biggest competition an athlete will face is from within. Battling with the mind to harness its power can be what makes or breaks sporting professionals in the end. Visualising success, building strengths, developing routines, having a structured plan, learning to direct attention and managing stress and anxiety are some of the tools that the mind needs to achieve its peak performance.

Recognising the mind’s ability is the first step on the journey to optimising response patterns when it comes to an athlete’s success on the range, track or field. Achieving that synergy between the two components of your being will be what gets you there in the end. Don’t ignore your brain, embrace its uniqueness!

Find out about my mental training programme for shooting sports by completing the 30-second survey in the pop-up on your screen.