What is mental skills training?
Whether you’re tackling your first 10k road race or an elite athlete training for international competition, you can benefit by strengthening your ‘mental toughness’. Mental skills training can help you achieve your goals by incorporating empirically tested and proven techniques into physical training and racing plans to help you perform at your best and reach your full potential. Many clients find these skills are not only useful in sport, but also very transferrable to other aspects of their lives.
Is it right for me?
Do you want to improve your training quality and performance? If yes, mental skills training is for you! Many athletes incorrectly assume that mental skills training is something you do when things are going wrong. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Although many of the skills that you learn can be very useful in helping you during difficult times, mental skills training programs are focused on helping you train and perform to the best of your ability. Mental skills training can help give you that ‘extra edge’. You’re already committed to the physical and technical training in your sport, now you can maximize this effort by developing your mental toughness too.
What can I expect?
No two athletes are the same. Everyone has unique goals and experiences. Therefore, at HYPERFORMANCECOACHING™, customized mental skills training programs are created to ensure each athlete is working on a program that addresses their unique individual needs.
All programs at HYPERFORMANCECOACHING™ start with a one-on-one initial consultation to gain a better understanding of your background and future goals. For example, we may ask about your competition level, biggest successes and challenges, current goals, and other questions that will help us gain a better understanding of your mental game strengths and areas for improvement.
Based on our initial consultation with you, we will create a mental skills training plan. This plan will identify the most important mental skills for you and outline techniques to help you learn and apply these skills. In your one-on-one sessions, our specialists will guide you through the acquisition of these skills and provide strategies to successfully incorporate these skills into your training and competition plans.
Our programs may include strategies and techniques to help you:
- Relax under pressure
- Improve motivation
- Overcome setbacks
- Manage sport performance anxiety
- Use imagery to enhance performance
- Build confidence
- Stay positive when things don’t go as planned
- Set and achieve goals
- Regulate arousal levels
- and become more mentally tough to achieve breakthrough performances!
I am already training many hours each day and don’t have a lot of time to commit to mental skills training. How can you help?
We understand that athletes are committed to developing the physical and technical side of their sports, and mental skills training must support, not take away, from this time. Therefore, our programs are not just individually tailored to your mental skills training needs, but we also work to create a program that fits within your time constraints. Our job is to work with you to put together a plan that you can commit to. For some athletes, this may mean committing as little as 5 minutes a day to mental training. Mental training completed on a regular basis can go a long way! Remember, mental skills training can help to make the physical and technical training more effective…so you can think of mental training as a way of getting the most out of those precious physical training hours!