The Tribune

By DR KENT L BAZARD

Sports Medicine Physician

BEFORE competition, we expect athletes to warm up their bodies. A sprinter performs drills and progressively faster accelerations. A swimmer completes several lengths at increasing intensity. A basketball player shoots, moves through footwork patterns and gradually increases the pace.

We understand that asking the body to go from sitting still to maximal performance without preparation makes very little sense. Yet there is another part of the athlete that we frequently expect to go from zero to one hundred almost instantly - the mind.

I have watched athletes spend an hour preparing their muscles for competition and almost no time preparing mentally. Then, minutes before the event, somebody tells them, “Focus,” “Relax,” “Don't be nervous,” or my personal favourite, “Just go out there and do what you normally do.”

The problem is that when an athlete's heart is racing, the crowd is loud, expectations are high and months of preparation have suddenly been reduced to one race, one shot or one performance, doing what you “normally do” may not feel normal at all.

Mental preparation is not about eliminating emotion. It is about learning how to perform while experiencing it. Nervousness before competition is normal. So is excitement. The physiological responses are remarkably similar: heart rate rises, breathing changes, adrenaline increases, attention becomes sharper and muscles prepare for action. The question is not simply whether an athlete is nervous. The more important question is whether the athlete can regulate that arousal to a level that helps rather than interferes with performance.

Sports psychology has long explored the relationship between arousal and performance. We sometimes describe it using the inverted-U principle: too little arousal may leave an athlete flat and unresponsive, while excessive arousal can interfere with coordination, attention and decision-making.

Somewhere between the two is an optimal zone. Importantly, that zone is not identical for every athlete or every sport. A 100-metre sprinter may benefit from a relatively high level of activation immediately before the gun. A golfer standing over a four-foot putt requires a very different state. Even two sprinters in the same race may perform best at completely different levels of emotional intensity.

This is why simply telling every athlete to “get hyped” before competition can be counterproductive. Being excited is not the same as being ready.

One of the most useful tools in sports psychology is the pre-performance routine. This is a consistent sequence of thoughts and actions performed before execution.

Research supports its usefulness. A meta-analysis examining 112 effect sizes found that pre-performance routines improved sporting performance, including under pressure. These routines can include breathing, imagery, self-talk, physical actions and focusing attention on a specific external target.We see these routines everywhere, even if we do not recognise them as sports psychology.

A basketball player may bounce the ball a specific number of times before a free throw. A tennis player develops a routine before serving. A high jumper may perform the same movements before beginning the approach. A sprinter settles into the blocks using a familiar sequence. These behaviours are not necessarily superstition. When properly designed, the routine creates familiarity in an environment that may otherwise feel unpredictable.

The routine tells the brain: I have been here before. I know what comes next.

Breathing can be an important part of that process. When an athlete becomes excessively anxious, breathing often becomes rapid and shallow. Purposefully slowing the breath, particularly emphasizing a controlled exhalation, can help bring excessive physiological arousal down. This does not mean we are trying to make the athlete sleepy or completely relaxed. We are trying to move the athlete toward the level of activation at which they perform best. For the athlete who tends to become overwhelmed before competition, controlled breathing may be useful.

For an athlete who routinely starts competition flat, the strategy may instead involve movement, energizing cue words and a more stimulating warm-up.

Visualisation, or mental imagery, is another powerful tool, but it is frequently misunderstood. Visualisation is not simply closing your eyes and imagining yourself standing on a podium. Effective imagery involves mentally rehearsing the performance itself.

The sprinter can visualise leaving the blocks, transitioning through acceleration and remaining technically composed at maximal velocity. The swimmer can mentally rehearse the start, breakout, stroke rhythm, turns and finish. A basketball player can rehearse a free throw in a noisy gym. A pitcher can imagine executing the pitch with runners on base.

There is meaningful research behind this. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis incorporating 86 studies and 3,593 athletes found that imagery practice improved athletic performance, with greater benefits when imagery was combined with additional psychological skills rather than used completely in isolation.

The important message for athletes is that mental imagery should be trained just like a physical skill. Practicing it regularly is considerably more useful than suddenly attempting visualisation five minutes before the biggest competition of your life.

Self-talk is another component of mental preparation. Every athlete talks to themselves, whether they realise it or not. The question is whether that conversation is helping. “Don't false start.”

“Don't miss.” “Don't mess this up.” “Everyone is watching me.” These thoughts direct attention toward the very outcome the athlete is trying to avoid.

Useful self-talk tends to be brief and purposeful. Sometimes it is motivational: “I am ready.”

Sometimes it is instructional: “Stay tall,” “quick hands,” “smooth,” “commit,” or “finish.”

The exact words matter less than their relevance to the athlete and the task. The objective is not to convince yourself that you are unbeatable. It is to direct attention toward something useful and controllable.This brings us to focus.

Under pressure, athletes frequently begin paying attention to the wrong things: the opponent, the crowd, the previous mistake, what their parents will say, whether a scout is watching or what happens if they lose.

None of those thoughts help execute the next movement. Mental preparation teaches athletes to repeatedly bring attention back to controllable information: breathing, positioning, rhythm, the target, the next play or a technical cue.

Recent research on choking under pressure reinforces this idea. A 2026 meta-analysis found that psychological interventions including quiet-eye training, pre-performance routines, mindfulness and self-talk produced improvements in several measures of sports performance under pressure.

In other words, performing under pressure is not simply something an athlete either possesses or does not possess. Components of it can be trained.

The mental warm-up should therefore begin before competition day. Coaches can deliberately create controlled pressure during practice. Put something on the line. Have teammates watch.

Create a score. Give the athlete one attempt instead of ten. Practice the final free throws while tired. Allow the swimmer one race-pace start. Ask the sprinter to execute after waiting several minutes, just as they might in competition.

The objective is not to constantly make athletes anxious. It is to expose them periodically to enough pressure that they can practice controlling ttheir response.

The evening before competition, mental preparation should actually become simpler. This is generally not the time for an athlete to completely reconstruct technique. Review the plan, prepare equipment, eat appropriately, hydrate and prioritise sleep. An athlete lying in bed replaying every possible way tomorrow could go wrong is not preparing; they are consuming mental energy.

On competition morning, familiarity is valuable. Eat foods you know your body tolerates. Follow the hydration strategy you have practiced.

Avoid experimenting with unfamiliar supplements or consuming enormous amounts of caffeine because the competition feels important.

Excessive caffeine can increase tremor, gastrointestinal discomfort, heart rate and feelings of anxiety in susceptible athletes. More stimulation is not necessarily better performance.

As competition approaches, the athlete's world should gradually become smaller. Several hours beforehand, you may be thinking about the overall event. During the warm-up, attention shifts toward your body and technical preparation. In the final minutes, the focus becomes the immediate task. By the final seconds, there may be only a breath, a target and one cue word.

That is mental preparation.

Nutrition and recovery are also part of this conversation because the brain is biological tissue, not something separate from the body. An athlete who is sleep deprived, dehydrated, under-fuelled and physically exhausted may interpret the resulting poor concentration and irritability as a psychological problem.

Adequate carbohydrate availability supports both physical work and the energetic demands associated with prolonged competition. Appropriate hydration helps maintain physiological and cognitive function. Sleep influences reaction time, learning, mood and decision-making. Sometimes preparing the mind begins with taking better care of the body.

Parents have a role here as well. The car ride to competition is usually not the ideal time for a motivational speech, technical critique and reminder of everything that is at stake. Some athletes want conversation.

Others need music, quiet or their own routine. Ask them. A parent's anxiety can very easily become the athlete's anxiety.

“You've prepared. Trust your training. Enjoy competing,” may be far more useful than repeatedly reminding a young athlete how important the day is.

Coaches should similarly learn their athletes individually. One athlete may need intensity before competition; another may need calming. One wants detailed instructions; another performs better with a single cue.

Coaching psychology is not about producing identical emotional states across a team. It is about helping each athlete discover the state in which they perform best.

At Empire Sports Medicine & Performance, we increasingly view performance preparation as an integration of physical and mental readiness. Strength, power, mobility, conditioning, nutrition and recovery matter tremendously, but none operates independently of the nervous system.

An athlete can be physically prepared and still perform poorly if anxiety, attention or emotional regulation interferes with execution.

Mental preparation should therefore not be something we introduce only when an athlete develops a “problem.” It belongs in normal performance training.

I would encourage athletes to develop a simple routine. Know how you want to breathe. Know where you want your attention.

Choose one or two cue words. Mentally rehearse what successful execution feels like. Practice the routine during ordinary training until it becomes familiar. Then use the same process when the stakes increase.

And perhaps most importantly, do not expect the nerves to disappear. The butterflies are allowed to be there. Your job is to teach them how to fly in formation.

Athletes spend years training their bodies to know what to do. The purpose of mental preparation is to make sure that when the moment finally arrives, the mind allows the body to do it.