👋 Hey. Welcome to issue #101 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter.
Olympics fever has us by the balls. As a follow on from last week, here's more relevant tools from 100 newsletters to help us appreciate what's going on in the Parisian pressure cooker (4 min read):
🎯 Pressure prescription #1: Focus (from newsletter #22)
The performance confidence operating system and framing nerves from last week's newsletter can help the athletes in Paris get in the right state of mind to perform.
But what happens when the game’s in the balance?
A clutch kick to win gold.
In the moment, do they execute or choke...
See, pressure comes in the form of distraction.
It can be internal (they're own expectations, dreams, stories they tell themselves).
Or it can be external (media, expectations from others, conditions).
And pressure kills performance because the focus isn’t on the task at hand.
So they need to pull their attention back to the present.
The next task. The process.
It's why you see athletes rub their hands on the grass, squirt water on themselves, or slap their faces.
These are tactics to help pull themselves into the present moment.
To help them focus.
Because focus is the antidote to pressure.
But what do we focus on?
🐎 Pressure prescription #2: Be a racehorse (from newsletter #39)
An old athletics coach taught me to stand a metre back from everyone else when behind the blocks about to start.
I'd be thinking about my race. They'd be thinking what the short kid in lane 7 was up to.
That was the theory anyway.
Though reality was probably more like me thinking about them thinking about what I was doing. Them focusing on their race 😂
And if you watched Netflix's sports doco series 'Sprint', you'll know the mind games these athletes play.
Trynna get in each other's heads. Carrying on. Trying to distract their competitors.
No sport is exempt.
The antidote?
Be a racehorse.
Racehorses have blinders put on the sides of their eyes.
It’s so they can’t see what the other horses are doing.
Because if they do, they get flustered, distracted and slow down.
They fall to the level of their competition.
The best athletes take the racehorse mindset.
They put the blinders up.
If the world was on fire, they wouldn't know.
They focus on themselves and what they're about to do.
But we can get even more granular than that...
🧠 Pressure Prescription #3: Secondary task demands (from newsletter #22)
After years of practice of a skill, we get to the point where the skill execution is automatic (we don’t have to think about it at the step-by-step level).
A pro serving in tennis doesn’t have to think about their stance, balance, grip, toss, strike…
They did when they were starting out. But now it’s automatic.
Here’s the thing:
Research has found one of the causes of choking under pressure is called "explicit monitoring".
Explicit monitoring shifts an athlete's mental processes from subconscious to conscious.
And their tennis serve starts to look more like it did when they were learning, rather than the one that earned them the right to get the Olympic rings tattooed on their arse.
Plus, it means they're not thinking about their strategy.
They're not picking up cues from the opponent. How they're gonna manipulate them. How they're gonna win the next point.
These are known as secondary task demands.
So when the pressure arrives, the great players learn to:
Notice distracting thoughts
Bring themselves back to the present
Put their focus on secondary task demands or the things that will allow them to execute
This is what it looks like:
Taylor Fritz is playing Rafael Nadal in a tournament final.
Taylor's got himself to championship point. He’s serving to win.
And this is his thought process:
“Championship point. He’s against the wind, so it’s not going to come super fast at me.
As long as I make my first serve, he’s going to play it a bit safer.
I’m nervous. And I know that he knows that I’m nervous.
Maybe I can break the pattern of what I’m doing.
Go for the shot that he’s going to expect least.
Go.”
Pure secondary task demands. Pure focus on strategy.
He executes.
And he wins.
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
Matt
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