Unlock your true sporting potential

Want to unlock your true potential? Developing the ability to stay fully present with what you’re doing is just as important in sport as it is in life, say our experts. Clinical psychologist Dr Tim Pineau, co-developer of Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement (MSPE), and sports psychologist Dr Gemma Applegarth explain how active mindfulness works, why attention is the real currency of performance, and how training your mind can help you perform better under pressure – on and off the field.

How does active mindfulness work?
This is an important distinction, because even though formal meditation is an integral part of MSPE and mental training for sport, we are not training athletes to meditate while they are competing!  Rather, we are helping them lay the groundwork to train and compete mindfully. I say this to my athletes all the time – why do we call it mindfulness practice? Practice for what? Practice for living.  To put it more plainly, taking time to engage in traditional meditation where, perhaps, someone focuses their attention on a particular anchor like the breath, and then returns their attention to that anchor over and over during a set period of time, helps establish the mental muscle memory, so to speak, to then be mindful ‘in motion.’ 

So when they are in practice or competition, they are focused on the task at hand (e.g. executing a play) and just like in meditation, some distraction, either external or internal, may pull their attention away. Because they have been doing the traditional practice, they will be better equipped in that moment to notice their limited attentional resources being spent somewhere other than where they need to be. And just like returning to the breath in meditation, they have trained their mind to let go of the distracting thought and come back to the present moment. Mindfulness ‘in motion’ is really just making the ongoing, repeated choice to be fully present with what you’re doing.

How important is it to stay present while training or playing sport?
It is incredibly important to be able to stay present in sport.  A sport psychologist I really respect, Dr. Peter Haberl, has a great quote that I share all the time: “attention is the currency of performance.” An athlete can be the strongest, fastest, most tactically skilled or whatever, but if in the moment of play when they need to execute those abilities they are preoccupied with a mistake they made a few minutes ago, or worrying about some future outcome that hasn’t happened yet, they are more than likely not going to be able to perform to their full potential. 

The empirical evidence on human attention is clear – we have limited attentional resources. So if we are not able to put those resources where they need to be, when they need to be there, we are limiting our performance capacity. While I personally believe that mindfulness is so much more than attention training, it is also true that mindfulness is uniquely suited to help us to more intentionally regulate our attention. 

First, I think it helps us unlock potential that’s already within us that we’re just not using (i.e. simply by applying a higher percentage of our attentional resources to a given activity, we will perform better even if we haven’t increased muscle mass or aerobic capacity). But I also think it helps us actually squeeze more juice out of each training session. 

Imagine an athlete doing a series of 200m sprints. That particular workout, by design, creates increasing fatigue over time, and those last 25m of each sprint mentally feel harder and harder. Then the distracting thoughts start to pop up: “this hurts,” “I need to slow down,” “I don’t know if I can do this.” And then the athlete latches on to those distracting thoughts and starts judging and projecting: “I’m so weak, I can’t believe I want to give up,” “coach is going to be so disappointed in me if I can’t complete this.” Now that athlete has a much larger percentage of their attentional resources dedicated to self-conscious thoughts and fears about the future, rather than on simply putting one foot in front of the other, and that very often will result in slower times. 

But an athlete who is trained in mindfulness can have a different experience. It’s not as if that athlete will never have those distracting or self-doubting thoughts. Of course they will! They are totally natural. But that athlete will be better positioned to recognise them as just thoughts rather than reality (i.e. just because I want to slow down doesn’t mean I have to) and just like in meditation, pull their attention back from then-and-there to the here-and-now, and choose to lean into those last 25m. So the mindful athlete is able to push just a little bit harder in those last 25m on each of those 200m sprints, and therefore gets a little more benefit from the training than the athlete who slowed down by a fraction of a second because they were consumed with judgment and doubt.

The mindful athlete is able to push just a little bit harder.

What are the key body signals we should be tuning into during training?
This is a tough one. I think it depends on the athlete, the sport, and the specific task at hand. I do think for any athlete, bodily signals that tend to reflect reactivity, fear, or anxiety are important to be aware of. The signals themselves are not the issue – it’s the stories we tell about the signals. If an athletes feels some uneasiness in their stomach before a competition, it’s easy to interpret that as anxiety, then label that anxiety as ‘bad,’ and then tell a story about that ‘bad’ anxiety, like “I’m not prepared” or “this isn’t going to go well,” which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas that athlete could observe the same body signal and instead think, “of course I’m a little anxious, this means a lot to me! That’s why I’ve spent so much time training!” Then suddenly that athlete is thinking about the effort they put in, which may help them feel more confident. We can’t always control how we feel, and it’s not like we can manifest confidence out of thin air, but what we pay attention to matters, and if we pay attention to things that are more likely to make us feel more confident, then we’re giving ourselves the chance to get unstuck from that fear-based story.

Can practising mindfulness help us to build mental flexibility, toughness, endurance or resilience?
In short, I think the answer is yes to all of them, though resilience and flexibility are the ones that seem most closely linked. I think one definition of resilience is being able to put your attention where you want it to be, when you want it to be there, regardless of distraction (stress, fatigue, whether you are behind or ahead etc). That’s precisely what mindfulness trains people to do. I often say that mindful performance is a state of being or performing when we are maximally flexible. 

My colleagues and I emphasise the ideas of empowerment and choice. Being more intentional in our actions is inherently connected with making choices rather than acting from habit or autopilot. Jon Kabat-Zinn talked about the “straightjacket of autopilot,” where our reactivity dictates what we do rather than our goals or values. When we are more mindful, we recognise the interdependence of all of our actions, and we start to understand that getting the most out of our practice isn’t just about bringing more attention to it, but staying on top of our other life responsibilities so we carry less stress into practice – going to bed on time and eating well so we have sufficient energy for practice, being kind and compassionate in our relationships so we’re not distracted by the anger or regret that comes from interpersonal conflict. 

Think about the judgements and expectations we have when training and competing. If we expect a team we are facing to be an ‘easy win,’ but it ends up being more difficult than we thought, we may get thrown into judgments about how badly we’re performing or how ashamed we are to be ‘losing.’ We get caught up in those painful feelings and end up performing even worse, wheeling headlong into a difficult loss. But if we can observe what is happening without judgement (“facing this team is different than I thought it was going to be”) we can apply curiosity about why that might be and pivot as necessary (e.g. apply a different offensive strategy). Being able to take in what’s happening as it is, without judgement, and seeing the options we do have rather than spending attention and energy on wishing we had different options, is foundational for mental flexibility.

How can we build mindfulness into our routine without it feeling like just another task?
This is such an important question. The idea of adding on another task can often be a pretty significant blocker for people, and it’s one of the reasons more athletes don’t engage in systematic mental training. That being said, I do want to emphasise that rigorous, effective mental training does take time and effort! Mindfulness training requires commitment and dedication. But we don’t go from 0 to 100 too quickly. The first home practice we suggest in MSPE is only 3 minutes! Not a huge ask. And as people get a taste of mindfulness and the ripple effects it can have, their intrinsic motivation develops. So, in the long run, the extra ‘task’ of meditating no longer feels like it is coming at the expense of other things we want to do – instead, it is the thing we want to do and the narrative gets turned on its head – meditation doesn’t interfere with the time we want to spend scrolling on our phone; the impulse to scroll on our phones becomes the thing that interferes with our meditation practice. 

That said, there are so many ways to take things we are already doing and turn them into mindfulness training. Things like warm ups, cool downs and stretching are perfect for this. These are often the parts of our workouts or training we pay the least attention to because the stakes feel the lowest. But in a culture where schedules are so packed, and as people who have chosen to dedicate some of our limited time to training, why would we ‘waste’ those precious minutes!?  One of the teams I work with does a mindful warm up lap at the beginning of every practice. They would be doing it anyway, but rather than just chatting or listening to music, they are intentionally shifting their awareness into their bodies, setting an intention for the practice ahead, and warming up their minds in addition to their bodies. 

I was a rower in high school and college and at practices the sloppiest rowing would always happen after the last hard work of the day ended and we had to row back to the dock. We were all so glad the practice was over and our minds were already at breakfast while our bodies were just trying to catch up. But every time we engage in our sport we are reinforcing habits. So in those final meters, when our minds were elsewhere, we were counteracting all the hard work we had just put in and reinforcing sloppy rowing and bad habits. So when I work with crew teams now, I tell them that those final meters are some of the most important they will row all day – it’s their opportunity to reinforce good habits and train their minds to stay focused even when their bodies are exhausted, because that is where a team wins or loses. What often determines success at that level is whether athletes can stay mentally sharp even as their bodies are pushed to the limit. So why wouldn’t we train that?  

Can you talk us through a practical technique to help people stay calm under pressure during a challenging training session or competition?
This is tricky to answer.  It makes me think of an analogous question: what’s a practical technique to help someone squat 300lbs? Proper form is important. And applying proper form probably does allow someone to squat more weight. But not even the best form can help someone to squat 300lbs if they haven’t trained up to that weight. So how does someone stay calm under pressure in competition? They meditate for 6 months before that moment ever comes. Without that training, there’s not really a mindfulness technique that will reliably be helpful. Another analogy my colleagues and I use a lot (we did not come up with this but we like it a lot) is that trying to apply mindfulness for the first time in a crisis situation is like trying to learn how to swim when you’re drowning. So it is important to emphasise that mindfulness requires this kind of preparation before you can benefit from it in high pressure situations. That’s why we structure MSPE the way we do, building up our practice over several weeks before we try to apply mindfulness to sport. 

Never underestimate the power of some deep breaths.

But if you have that training, never underestimate the power of some deep breaths. A primary cause of performance disruption is over-arousal. When the nervous system is over-activated, a variety of cascading effects can harm performance. We experience muscle tension – tense muscles consume more resources and absorb oxygen less efficiently. We turn to rapid, shallow breathing – because of the way our lungs are structured, that means less oxygen from the air reaches our bloodstream, so our muscles and brain get less of the fuel they need to function. And of course, we tend to interpret these physiological effects as ‘bad’ and become anxious, which pulls our attention away from the present moment. 

Staying intentional with your breath and keeping it full and deep can help to calm your nervous system, regulate arousal and mitigate all of those harmful effects, especially if you’re able to extend your exhale longer than your inhale. This is different to meditation, when we use our breath as the anchor for our attention, but similar in that we are bringing our full attention to the here and now. Be where your feet are, as they say. In meditation, the focus on the breath is the task. In a high pressure situation, we can briefly return to our breath when we notice signals of over-activation, and by breathing with deliberate intention we can refocus our mind and bridge our attention back to the task at hand, while giving our body what it needs to perform well.