“If I just jump farther, I am going to make it....” “I am
going to try harder this time, that will work” “I am stronger than this” “what
the hell is going on?...I am really slow today”.
Do any of these thoughts or something similar ring a bell? Please take a second as you read this to
realize in this environment, I have no agenda to compete with you on any level
and only seek to share some experience and knowledge with you. Try very hard to
open up to the fact you might not know how to preform better. When I say, “you
might not know how”, I mean you might know how
to hit that third turn on the course with great speed and in a good line, but
do you know how to hit it like you dream of hitting it? Think about that for a
second. Let it sink in. How many times have you ever been in the middle of an
activity and had a short moment of that dream state or done something that just
seemed to happen and it was perfect?
Called many things by many people, “The Zone”, “The Moment”
and many more; that place in your mind where you feel everything on auto and
your brain is engaged in high level strategy and not locked into and limited to
dealing with emotions and suffering. In this mental state, if you can get
there, the highest levels of performance are achieved. I am no talking about trying harder. The
point is if you have to think about what you are doing, the game is already
over, you have already been passed, you have just taken your kneecaps off on a rock
sticking out on the trail or worse yet, you are still trying hard and have no
idea how to really dig deeper to get your performance up.
The athletic body is made up of a mass of memories of
movement. Right or wrong, every movement you have ever done is stacked up in
your body to reproduce later. The problem is, when you are close to peak
physical output levels, most often you are also allowing your physical stress
load to cause your brain to spin out too. During these peak times, you have to
have a rehearsed method of dealing with extreme calmness during, close to fight
or flight levels of physical performance.
I offer a few questions here to start the process for you.
Read through these and ask yourself, in pure honesty, are you a physical
performer, in the middle or a mental performer? These questions will be a start
to knowing how to approach your training going forward.
·
Do you lose focus and memory of the experience
when you are physically maxed out?
·
During times of “FLOW” in your peak moments, are
you fully aware of strategy?
·
Does mass physical suffering during an activity
cause you stress and emotional hardship.(loosing faith and confidence, mood
swings)
·
Before you start an activity at a high level, do
you have the outcome planned?
To know where you rate, look at your answers and use common
sense. If you think about what the correct answer might be and how you rate,
you are already forming the mindset to bettering your performance. This is the
side of your mind being open to a mental plan of performance over a physical
one. Get it?
I hope you continue to come to LarryB Sports Mind and read
on. Share this with your training partners and work together to better both of your performance levels. I will do my best as a coach and fellow athlete to pass along ideas I have
incorporated into my training methods that have helped not only myself, but
many others reach top levels of performance in the face of stress, fear and
mental detachment.
I hope you can learn to be the athlete you dream of being.
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