Mental Training for Athletes: How to Build a Stronger Mental Game

Eli Straw (0:00)

Mental training is the process of developing mental skills through repeated, deliberate training. Now, for athletes, I like to approach this in a very similar way to how we approach physical training. Because as athletes, when we approach our physical skills, you know, we identify the weaknesses, we identify our strengths, and then we create some plans to work on those skills. Mental training is very similar. So what I want to go over in today's episode is just everything about mental training, especially, you know, what mental training is, why it is so important for athletes. And then I'm going to go into some different ways you can strengthen your mind, some of the main mental training tools and exercises that I use as a mental performance coach, and then just some ways that you can make this more actionable and apply it to your game. Now, when we think about working on our mindset, we have to break this mental training down into three different categories. Or at least, that's the way I like to approach it within my work. The first category is mental game challenges. The second category is mental skills. And the third category is mental training tools or exercises. So the reason I break it down like this is because it shows us this progression, right? We identify that there are certain mental game challenges that we're facing as an athlete, and then we know that there are mental skills we want to develop. And then there are tools that we want to use, and exercises we want to use to develop those skills. Now, some of the main mental game challenges will involve fear of failure, sports performance anxiety, perfectionism, negative self-talk, social approval, losing your composure, and poor focus. Now, you know, all of these are pretty, you know, they're pretty common within sports because naturally we don't want to mess up. So we, you know, so it's easy to become afraid of making mistakes. It's easy to worry about what will happen, experience anxiety, lose focus, talk negatively to ourselves.

But when we experience those things, right? And when we are struggling with fear, when we are playing with a lot of anxiety, we will see that our play is affected, right? And we tend to not play our best. And within my work, these challengers are one of the main reasons why, or the reasons why athletes will do better in practice than they do in games, or, you know, they'll do better when they're just playing pickup, or they're practicing on their own or something. And then when their team's around, or they're in a more stressful environment, they end up struggling more.

Now, the opposite of the mental game challenges are the mental skills that we want to work on. Now, these mental skills, they work kind of in the opposite, or in the inverse to those mental game challenges. And the main mental skills we want to work on, self-awareness, self-confidence, managing mistakes, focus, calming your nerves, and goal setting. And there are a lot of different mental skills as well that we can work on, but those are the main ones, right? So self-awareness means we're understanding ourselves better. We start to understand why we act certain ways in different situations, why we perform more freely when we're facing this one type of opponent, compared to this other time when we're playing scared, we're holding ourselves back, we're playing with our foot on the break.

The self-confidence piece is probably the most common mental skill, right, that we're trying to develop as athletes. We want to have more confidence in ourselves. Managing mistakes means just bouncing back from mistakes better. Focus is going to help us in all different respects of our game. Calming nerves means we're able to manage our nervousness, manage the worries we have. And then goal setting is really understanding how you need to approach the game from a goal setting standpoint to really get the best out of yourself.

Now, once we identify the mental skills we want to work on, well, then we have to think about how we're actually going to work on those skills. You know, so for example, if I'm a basketball player and I want to work on my shot, I'll probably go to a shooting coach and the shooting coach will give me some drills and everything to work on. And then I'm going to use those drills on my own, whether it's, you know, form shooting drills or whether it's spot shooting drills, whatever it ends up being, I'm going to do those drills repeatedly. That's what we compare these mental training tools to. Because these mental training tools, and what's kind of cool about them is they can absolutely help in the moment to generate a different mindset. So for example, the first mental training tool I have listed here is mindfulness meditation. Now, if you perform mindfulness meditation before games, and this is a really common tool or exercise that I'll have athletes go through, especially if they're dealing with a lot of anxiety. If you do that before a game, it's very likely that you'll then go into that game feeling calmer, feeling more present. So it will have an immediate impact on your mindset.