Achieving Athletic Performance Success In Competition
In a earlier post, How to Have a Successful Practice Session, I discussed how to set yourself up for success in your athletic practice and training sessions. Today we’ll take a look at how to set yourself up for success in your athletic competition.
Reaching peak athletic performance is far too involved and comprehensive to set specific rules and guidelines that will guarantee success in a competition. There is always some likelihood, that no matter how much you prepare, that things won’t play out the way you imagined during a competition.
With that, there are things you can do to set yourself up and to position yourself to increase your chance for personal success during a competition.
In the last post, we discussed things you can do to set the stage for successful athletic performance in practice.
These included – setting practice goals, examining your past practices to look for trends, habits and other factors that contributed to a great practice. We talked about keeping baggage from your outside life separate from your training environment. And we also went over managing your self-talk so it supports your athletic performance in training, as opposed to beating yourself up.
So in today’s post we’re going to look at some ideas to use so that you can create an environment for competitive success and peak personal performance.
Focus On Your Personal Athletic Performance
Just as setting goals in practice can help your practice athletic performance, setting competition goals can help your competition athletic performance.
But these goals are different from what you may think.
If you’re like most athletes, you probably have goals in competition that are more ‘outcome’ orientated. These include:
- Make it to the finals
- Beating your opponent, or
- Finishing in a specific time
These are outcome goals because they focus on the outcome of the event and are not related to your athletic performance.
Now, take a moment and think about it….how many outcomes goals are really in your complete control?
None!
Sure, you can contribute to or affect the outcome, but you can’t control the outcome. So, why not put your mental attention to what you can control…you!
Sure you strive to win, but what if you perform at your peak…a new personal record, but your opponent performed just as well, better? Were you a failure because you hit a new PR but didn’t win the competition, something that was essentially out of your control?
You can set yourself up for competitive success but setting task or process goals (the same as in practice), these are things you have complete control over. This is something the majority of athletes often fail to do because they don’t understand really what is and is not in their control.
To achieve peak athletic performance in competition you need to focus on the things that will put you in a sate to reach your performance goals and let the outcome goal take care of itself.
Focus on your personal sport performance goals and let the results to care themselves.
As an example, a cyclist might set an outcome goal of winning their age group. The process or performance goals associated to this event might be to:
- Explode off the start to get good position
- Maintain a specific cadence during the race
- Hold to an aerodynamic position while riding downhill
If the cyclist is able to do these things, they’ll be in a favorable position to reach their outcome goal, i.e. win their age group.
Understand What IS In Your Control
As mentioned above, there are a number of factors that can influence your athletic performance. It is important to be able to distinguish between those that are in your control and those that are not. Then focus your attention and energy on the things that you have control over.
So, what are some of the things many athletes tend to waste their energy on that are out of their control?
- Their opponent(s)
- Their teammates performance
- The weather
- The referee’s
- The crowd noise, etc
These are all circumstances that are out of your control. Giving them attention will only rob you of your time, energy and focus.
For your specific sport, take a pad and draw a line down the middle making two columns. Label one column ‘Not Controllable’ and the other ‘Controllable.’ The under each column make a list of the factors that apply to each.
Be careful here…really think about what you can and can’t control. You may end up either think you have too much control or not enough. This is a subtle process.
Again, be wary of falling into the trap of focusing on things out of your control. Your time and energy are better spent on things that you can do control or influence. Doing so will set you up for personal performance success.
Condition Your Mind
Researchers have tried to identify the factors that have a positive and negative impact on the performance of Olympic athletes (1). Based on the findings of this research, one of the factors that differentiate the athletes that performed well from those that did not perform well was the development and adherence to a physical and mental training plan.
Successful athletes had pre-competition physical and mental routine that they stuck to.
In preparation for competition, most successful athletes have a specific warm up they go through to get their body ready to compete. Normally this is very systematic and structured in that the athlete knows exactly what they need to do to be physically ready to compete.
A similar approach should be taken with regard to mental preparation. Some things to consider in developing your own pre-competition mental training program are:
- Use specific empowering thoughts, words, images, and feelings to optimally prepare your mind to compete.
- Review successful past athletic performances to help determine how you need to think, feel, and focus to perform at your best.
Then, develop a preparation plan that will mentally prime you for the challenge ahead.
The key here is to be purposeful about preparing your mind and your body for the competition ahead.
Sure, all of these things may seem small when you look at then individually. But think about this…what distinguishes the gold medal winner from the silver finisher?
What’s the difference between the Bronze finisher’s and the “also ran’s?
Many times it comes down to the six inches between the ears, how the mentally prepared for the competition.
The best athletes in the world have strategies and tactics that support them to perform at their best.
Now use these successful athletic and model your own mental training program and you will enhance your athletic performance.
References:
- Gould D, Guinan D, Greenleaf C, Medbery R, Scrickland M, Lauer L, Chuung V, Peterson K, (1998). Positive and negative factors influencing U.S. Olympic athletes and coaches: Atlanta Games assessment. USOC Sport Science & Technology Grant Project Final Report. Colorado Springs, CO: USOC
