Effective Tactics For Intense Athletic Training

In a previous post, “Mental Strength Training For Quality Athletic Performance” I talked about the aspects a of quality athletic performance training session.

Really this is a relatively easy concept to understand and many athletes find it difficult to implement on a daily basis. You KNOW when you’ve had a “quality training session” and you can see it in others, as opposed to just going through the motions.

The mindset to have consistent quality training days is a mental strength characteristic of elite athletes and  is about making training a physical, technical and mental endeavor by bringing intensity, effort, purposefulness into the practice arena day after day.

Training with quality enhances your workout as well as sets you up for athletic peak performances in competition.

It’s essential to develop that tactics to deliver a purposeful and quality training and practice session.

Again, in the previous post some general mental strength skills and tactics were highlighted that can be used to enhance your quality in your training. The tactics include goal setting for training and practice, keeping athletic performance goals in front of you, putting aside  your “baggage of the day,” managing your self-talk and consistently striving for excellence.

I have received several tips from other athletes that I think will make a great follow-up to the last post.

I’ve found that many times, if something has worked for someone else it can work for you.  In NLP we call this “modeling.”

Below are some tactics that other athletes have used to generate great quality training and practice sessions.  Think of this as a buffet, take what you like and leave what you don’t.

It’s often good to do something that you don’t like, just for a bit, to mix-up your neural pathways.

Oh yea, sometimes it can help to have a mindset of you vs. them as you’ll in this great video:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBLV6RG4TwY[/youtube]

So here are some tactics from other athletes and coaches to help you create the mental strength for high quality athletic training sessions.

• “We use training cues to keep them focused on correct mechanics such as ‘hip first, left side block, pop at release’. We use only a few at a time otherwise the athletes are thinking too much and become too mechanical in their movement. In the weight room, we find one or two things the athlete needs to work on and repeat it to them often.”

Use of training cues will help you mentally engage in your athletic performance process and will help you focus on the critical aspects of the correct technique.

• “Athletes have a tendency to get a bit lazy during drill work because of its repetitious nature. So, prior to each drill, we have the athletes take a few seconds to visualize the drill where they see and feel correct execution. We have found they develop their skills quicker when we can get them really thinking about what they are doing.”

• “Every day, I write my goal into a notebook before I start training. I train on my own a lot and there are days I’m not too excited about practice and don’t have anyone to get me pumped. I know my bigger goals so I don’t write those down. But, every day, I write down one thing I need to work on to improve my performance. It is amazing how much this has helped my motivation in practice.”

One athlete had a unique strategy for utilizing proper nutrition for pre-, during and post training sessions as a way to facilitate quality to their training. Good nutrition helps both the mental and physical aspects of training performance.

• “Take time prior to a training session to get in the right frame of mind rather than just jumping into the session. I listen to certain music to get me focused and psyched. It is usually the same music but sometimes I change things up depending on how I feel.”

• “I know my workout for the next day so before I go to bed I go through the tough parts of the workout in my head. I do the same mental rehearsal sometime before the training session— it seems to get me ready for the challenge.”

Finally, one athlete commented that they usually train at a fairly high level on a daily basis. However, on days where they find they’re “just not into it” he “isn’t into” they take a break – literally. They stop their training session; they step away from the training area for a few minutes and regroup mentally. Then they identify one thing to focus on for the remainder of the workout.

I know that not all of these tactics may make sense or feel right for you and you can use them as a starting point to create your own tool box of mental strength strategies to bring quality to your training.

If you have any specific mental strength tactics that you use to enhance your training sessions please share them below.