6 “Mind Hacks” for Quality Sport Training

One thing every athlete knows is that you can’t fake fitness, technique, tactics, or competitive readiness. You just can’t do better than you’ve taught yourself. Also, for most athletes, time is a precious commodity that is in short supply, so it’s important to get the most out of your training efforts.

You have three goals related to your training. First, to be maximally prepared physically and mentally for each exercise. Second, to do your best to achieve your exercise goals. Third, to get the maximum benefit from these efforts. Achieving these goals is no easy task as there are so many things that can prevent you from putting in your best efforts for a quality workout, including time pressures, life stresses, distractions and pain.

Therefore, it is important to approach every aspect of your training consciously to ensure that you set yourself up for success with each of your workouts. To that end, let me share with you my six “mind hacks” for quality sports training.

1. Routines

Most athletes have some sort of pre-competition physical and mental routine that they use to prepare for game day, but few have similar routines to prepare them to get the most out of their training efforts. Training routines ensure the physical and mental readiness to maximize the value of your training. They also help create consistency, so your body and mind become conditioned to know that you’ll be ready to do your best as you progress through your exercise routine. They also provide familiarity, predictability, and control, all of which are essential for boosting motivation and confidence, reducing stress, and improving focus. A workout routine can include pre-workout nutrition, physical warm-up, and a psychological and emotional transition from life mode to workout mode (more on that in a moment).

2. Conscious engagement

As every athlete has learned, you don’t always come into a workout in the best physical or mental condition. You might be tired, stressed, or distracted; In other words, your mind and/or body just aren’t there to the fullest, resulting in you not being in the best place to get a quality workout. That’s why it’s so important to make a conscious commitment to do your best in a training session. When you tell yourself, “I am committed to giving my all in today’s practice,” you are taking control of your mind and body and commanding them to do what you want them to do. It also creates a different default setting – “best effort” – instead of “I’m not particularly excited about doing this now”.

3. Clear goal

You can’t get quality training if you don’t know what your goal is or how to get there. Before each workout, review your goals for the day and what you’re going to do specifically, including duration, structure (e.g., intervals, sets, reps, recovery), and performance goals (e.g., speed, strength, form) that you want to reach them.

4. Take a moment

Before you begin your practice, take a moment to transition from life to training. This mind hack involves closing your eyes, taking a few deep breaths, clearing your mind of whatever brought you to this point in your day, focusing on the task at hand, and engaging with your passion and goals connect to. One tool I’ve used with the pro athletes I work with is seeing themselves carrying a 30 pound workout. weight vest (symbolizing the burdens of life we ​​all carry with us) and imagining them removing it before a workout and experiencing the new feeling of lightness and energy that comes with shedding the weight vest.

5. Laser focus

Our primitive brain and body dislike difficult athletic training because it perceives the pain we experience no differently than the pain felt by our ancestors in the Serengeti 250,000 years ago when we first officially became homo sapiens. Through evolution we have learned that when we experience pain, death is likely to follow, so our body has learned to relax or stop when we experience pain. This response to pain may have worked very well for our ancestors, but it’s definitely not helping us achieve our athletic goals in 2023. In other words, if our primitive brain and primitive body were given a choice, we would stop exercising immediately at the least uncomfortable level.

This is why it is so important to maintain laser focus from the beginning to the end of your workout. Once you lose focus, your primitive side takes over and begins to throttle your effort, and you see a drop in your pace, strength, and the quality of your workouts. To help you keep your laser focus, I encourage you to focus on your effort, whether it’s your perceived exertion, rep count, good technique, or whatever goal metric you have in your workout pursue. I also advise against listening to podcasts, being on social media, or engaging in conversation during your quality workout (which usually means high-intensity effort) as all of these are too distracting. Music is fine as long as it’s used as a motivational tool and not a distraction.

6. Stick to the plan

This proposal can be interpreted in two ways. First, as we all know, athletes can be a very motivated group and as a result, they can choose to deviate from their training plan for the day because they’re feeling really good. So they decide to step on the gas even more. The upside (sort of) is that it makes you feel really strong, and that increased effort can boost both your motivation and confidence. The downside (not at all) is that your body can’t sustain this level of intensity for long and you’ll burn out quickly. One pro athlete I work with did this all the time last year, and unsurprisingly late in the season he was so overtrained that his results showed it. So my admonition here is to stay disciplined and stick to your exercise plan no matter how good you feel.

Second, and vice versa, there will be some days when you just don’t feel it, and trying to stick to your training schedule when your body is telling you not to is another recipe for overtraining and burnout. In this case, you want to be agile with your training session and adapt your training to what your body is telling you. For example, you might decide to cut the number of intervals or sets in half, lower the intensity, focus on technique or tactics, and instead go with simple volume. In doing so, you listen to your body (an essential exercise) and decide to hit hard another day when your body is ready and able.

If you consistently follow these six mind hacks in your training, you will find that the quality of your preparation, effort and results will increase, your fitness and athletic ability will steadily improve, and your efforts will ultimately pay off by achieving your competitive goals.