5 Exercises to Build Your Mental Performance Skills This Summer

Written by Alana Asch MS. CSCS. Mental Performance Coach

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One thing that everyone in the academic world lacks is time. It can feel like you and your mental health get thrown to the wayside because all of your time and energy is spent in classes, studying, practices, training, working, competing, all while trying to eat well, maintain relationships with friends and family, and still manage to get enough sleep so you can recover from all of the above.

The summer is a great time to start building the mental skills needed to help balance all of those plates. It should be part of your summer training program. If it’s not, I highly suggest you write it in. Right now, grab your training program and before the warm-up or after the cool-down, write: 10 minutes of mindset training.

But what does that look like?

Before we dive in, I want to emphasize that just like your sports skills, mental performance skills, and confidence are trainable. They are a practice. The more you do them, the better you get. And the more you do them with deliberate practice, the more they can help you on and off the court or field. Also similar to sports skills, it’s important to learn them in the off-season, under no pressure. That way, they’ll be more effective during game time. 

Think about lay-ups in basketball. Lay-ups are easy points. You rarely miss one when just shooting around with your friends. But at the end of the 4th quarter, when you’re down by one point with two seconds to go, it’s a lot harder to make that lay-up. Mental skills are the same. Coincidentally, mental skills will also help you with that lay-up with the game on the line. 

Here are 5 exercises that you can start using immediately to build your mental performance skills.

Breathing

Breathing is one of the most underrated yet most powerful tools you have. Maybe it’s a tool you have not dusted off recently, but with a little practice, breathing can become the sharpest tool in your toolbox. And if you have been working on it, like all skills, there is always room to grow and develop. The best place to start is to check in with your natural breath at least 3 times throughout the day. You can pair it with something you do already, like brushing your teeth, eating, making the bed, etc. You can also set reminders on your phone. This is starting to build the relationship with your breath. It’s like the first few dates. You’re just getting to know each other.

Everything starts and ends with our breath. Our entire lives start and end with our breath. Whenever we have an emotion or feeling, our breathing is the first thing to change. If we are anxious, our breathing is more rapid. If we are calm, our breathing is a lot slower. By controlling our breath, we can control our emotions better. For instance, when we’re going for that game-winning lay-up, a deep breath can help us stay in the right mindset rather than let performance anxiety take over and cause us to miss the shot we know we can make with ease.

It’s very important to acknowledge that we need to have a relationship with our breath before we rely on it. For instance, taking a deep breath before a penalty kick in soccer is helpful. But it’s a lot more helpful when you already have a relationship with your breath; when it’s already an anchor to help keep you grounded. That’s why it’s important to develop your relationship with your breath way before you get to the penalty line.  

After you are comfortable checking in with your breath several times a day, you can start to get more intimate with it. Set a timer on your phone for one minute and practice box breathing or other breathing patterns, such as breathe in for a count of 4, pause for 7, and out for 8. Another one is long, deep inhales through the nose, and double the time for your long sighs/exhales through the mouth.

Once you’ve gotten intimate with your breath and are officially in a relationship with the one thing that you will always have in your life, no matter what, you can take it up another notch. Simply extending the time from one to five minutes, and eventually even longer, will help develop the relationship even more. 

Just a heads up, you will not be focused on your breath for the whole time. Your mind will wander. That’s part of it. The point here is progress, not perfection. The point here is that when the game is on the line, the crowd is going crazy, your coach is yelling at you, the ref makes a terrible call—all things you can’t control, you can come back to one thing you can control, your breath. So, take a breath. Then take the shot.

Mantras

The definition of a mantra is “a statement or slogan repeated frequently.” Another way to think of mantras is 3 personal slogans, or 3 truths. Three things that resonate deeply with you and are 100% true to you and your heart. For instance, two examples of an Olympian sprinter’s mantras were, “I am fast like a bullet,” and “pump your arms.” 

Mantras help keep you grounded. If you’re nervous before a game, or maybe it’s one of those games when calls aren’t going your way, or you just made a mistake on the field/court (because you’re human and you will), you can use your mantras. Instead of yelling at the ref, fouling the other team, or making more mistakes and spiraling, think of your mantras, or your truths. Conversely, when things are going your way, you can also come back to your mantras instead of getting overconfident and too excited. 

Mantras also help you push further when you’re tired. When your legs feel like they are about to give out, use your mantra and keep going (“keep going” can even be your mantra, or part of one). These are not necessarily affirmations, but instead 3 things that you can tell yourself. No matter what happens, you know these things will always be true, and you can always come back to them to center yourself. 

It’s important to note that your truths are not necessarily positive; they can be neutral. The most important thing is that you have to really believe them and feel them with every muscle fiber and cell of your being.

I encourage you to think of your own, but if you need to borrow some for the time being, here are some my athletes have come up with:

I am the hardest worker in the room

Trust your training

Slay the dragon

Dig deep, kid

You got this

If it was easy, everyone would do it

Reset 

Athletes are all humans, and all humans make mistakes. One of the things that separates good athletes from great athletes is how they bounce back from those mistakes. Having a reset routine can help you bounce back. Brain Cain, mental performance coach, calls this the three Rs: recognize, release, refocus. Female Footballers, a non-profit dedicated to helping youth female soccer players build mindset training tools, calls this reset rituals. Regardless of what you call it, having one of these is key. 

Let’s say you just missed a penalty shot. It happens. I know I’ve missed a wide-open net on the soccer field more times than I’d like to admit. One of our first thoughts might be, “I suck.” Rather than have our second thought support that thought, and the next touch we make causes a turnover, and then our thoughts start to wonder if anyone will ever pass us the ball again because we’re the worst soccer player on the team, maybe even ever… we can stop that negative spiral and use a reset ritual. A reset ritual is a verbal cue, similar to a mantra, along with a physical cue. A verbal cue I like to use is “next right touch,” and I snap my fingers. A verbal cue an athlete of mine has used is “onto the next,” and she would brush her shorts. And then add a deep breath to help ground you and bring you back to the present moment rather than go down a negative thought spiral. 

Your breath, mantras, and reset routines are powerful tools on their own. But the 3 of these things together as a reset ritual can be a game changer. 

Journaling

This one is straightforward, but it goes deeper than you think. For instance, think about the last time you made a mistake during a game and were ruminating for hours afterward. "If only I did this, I should have done that, how could I have missed this", etc. That rumination is an open loop in your brain. Those thoughts can run around for hours and even keep you up at night. By taking those thoughts and putting them on paper, you are closing the loop. 

Also, journaling is more impactful when you handwrite rather than type. I don’t necessarily know why, but I know that when you put pen to paper, it is a different process for your brain and body than when you type. Therefore, I encourage you to handwrite when you pick from some of the following prompts. 

A standard prompt my athletes often use is, “What are 3 things that went well and 3 things you want to work on?” You can do this at the end of the day, after a workout, after practice, and/or after games. If an athlete is someone who needs to work on their skill of self-talk and self-compassion, instead, I have them write down 3 things that went well and 1 thing to work on. 

Another prompt is for those athletes who need to work on their self-talk and self-compassion is a running list (that you may or may not finish anytime soon). This is called The Awesome List. The Awesome List is 100 reasons why you are awesome. If 100 sounds daunting, start with 10. This is going to be a lot more challenging for some people than others. That’s okay. It once took someone I worked with a whole weekend to think of 10 reasons she is awesome. It was extremely challenging and emotional for her, but she did it, and that began her confidence-building journey.

Similarly to the first prompt, write 3 daily wins every single day. They don’t have to be related to your sport, but they can be. For instance, a middle schooler I worked with once wrote that she decorated her teacher’s desk, who was gone for her honeymoon. Another youngster wrote that he did not fight with his brother that day. It could be that you did the dishes for your roommate, you aced a test, or you helped a teammate with a certain situation. Any good thing, no matter how big or how small, that has a positive impact on this world counts. 

The last suggestion for a prompt is to write down 1 line every night. Whatever you want, whatever is going on in your head. If you’re crunched for time, this is a good place to start. It helps build the habit. 

Visualizing

I’ve had athletes tell me that they tried to visualize before a game, but they didn’t think it did anything. Would you try taking one foul shot, missing, and then stop practicing because it didn’t do anything? The first time you tried to juggle a soccer ball, did you get 100 in a row and then give up because it doesn’t do anything? No. All of these skills take reps to develop.

Visualizing is being still and imagining the game in your mind. Think about all 5 of your senses one by one, and try to imagine the game happening with every single cell in your body, like you're actually experiencing it.  If it feels weird or uncomfortable, that’s okay. If you don’t think you’re doing it right, that’s okay. Keep doing it. If you don’t know where to start, here is a link to one I created with Female Footballers. It’s designed for soccer players, but you can insert your sport whenever I talk about soccer-specific things. 

Visualizing works because it helps with your focus and develops your motor skills. It is helping prepare your body for the success it’s about to have. Peak Performance Sports explains it as “a way of conditioning your brain for successful outcomes. The more you mentally rehearse your performance, the more it becomes habituated in your mind…When athletes visualize or imagine a successful competition, they actually stimulate the same brain regions as you do when you physically perform that same action.” Lastly, it’s a great way to help reduce pregame anxiety. When you visualize, you can eliminate some of the unknowns that your brain is wondering about. Instead of thinking, “what if I mess this up” or “what if I make that mistake?” you can visualize positive things to expect instead. 

Michael Phelps used visualization while training for the Olympics. His coach, Bob Bowman, has told the story of Phelps getting bored and visualizing things going wrong. He would imagine how he would react to those things. One of the imagined scenarios he thought of was his goggles coming off. In the 2008 200-meter butterfly final in the Olympics, this actually happened. He ended up knowing exactly what to do, since he imagined it, and not only won the race, but also broke the world record. One could argue that he was so good at visualizing that he actually made his own goggles come off.

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Now that you have 5 tools to help build your mental performance skills, it’s time to start practicing. Since you already wrote 10 minutes of mindset training on your summer packet, pick 1-2 to work on this week. Pick 1-2 to work on next week. And follow that routine all summer. You got this. 

Remember that these are skills. You are not going to be good at them the first time. You might not be good at them the 10th time. They take reps and practice, just like shooting free throws. They won’t be easy, and they might not be comfortable. But confidence and mental skills separate good athletes from great athletes. So keep practicing and developing these skills off the court or field, so that you can get the most out of them on the court or field.