Mental Game

Anyone who has gone through sports competition will agree that when physically all things are equal, the deciding factor that brings a dubya is mental. I’ve been reading a book called Competitive Fire by Michael Clarkson. In it, Clarkson shares his research on the mental/physical connection that elite athletes have mastered. He talks about the different mind/body states that athletes can achieve. Most of these are caused by different chemicals that the mind triggers to enter the bloodstream consequently giving the athlete boosted speed, strength, and mental focus. This isn’t the first blog entry I’ve posted on this subject, but I find it completely fascinating and worth further investigation.

The state of “flow” is familiar to those of us who have engaged in sports and felt that phenomenon. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion, you react instantaneously, and everything you do is executed flawlessly. While Clarkson doesn’t offer a silver bullet answer on how to achieve this state (nobody really knows), he does offer up what research he’s done on the matter.

Since in our modern society we rarely compete for actual survival, what we’ve essentially adapted our fight or flight instincts to protect is our ego. We might be training BJJ or playing basketball, but if you are convinced that the outcome of the competition is do or die, those primal survival instincts kick in and can be beneficial in your performance.

Too much chemicals, however, can cause a negative effect flooding your body with pain killers and making you “jittery” rendering all of your hard training useless.

Basically Clarkson tells us that elite athletes are the ones who are most capable of controlling what is essentially our body’s built-in fight or flight instincts. Techniques for doing this vary between athletes. Some use meditation, some are just naturally capable of remaining calm (Chuck Liddel?) This is the difference between good athletes and elite athletes.

Other books on the same topic:

• In Pursuit of Excellence
• The Mental Edge
• The Mental Athlete
• Mind Gym: An Athlete’s Guide to Inner Excellence
• What Makes Winners Win

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