Why Mental Training Is Crucial For Athletes: Here’s Why

The following is an edited excerpt from the book Playing in the Box: A Practical Guide for Helping Athletes Develop Their Mental Game by Pete Temple.

When I played Little League back in the late seventies, we rode our bikes to practice, or our parents dropped us off at the town baseball field. A few parents would hang around and watch, but most either left to go to work or run errands.

Our coach was usually a young guy who’d played baseball in high school, and he had all the expertise we needed. Most of us knew how to catch and hit, and the coach would show us how to backhand a grounder or pivot at second base for a double play. He would hit grounders for the infielders and fly balls for the outfielders, and that was practice. We played twelve to fifteen games a year, and our seasons ended in early August, so families could take vacations. When fall came, we played football.

Thirty years later, my son started Little League. And I quickly realized things had changed.

I was one of five coaches for my son’s team. None of the players rode their bikes to practice because they had too much to carry, such as bats and equipment bags with their names stitched onTO them. The dads built a custom batting cage so the coaches could give regular hitting instruction. In addition, some kids had private hitting coaches and pitching coaches.

My son’s team had a fifty-game schedule. Half of those games were out of town, and some of them were out of state. Many of the parents would stay to watch practice, and the games were huge events. Families brought lawn chairs, canopies, and coolers, settling in for three hours of watching twelve-year-olds play baseball.

Not only was this atmosphere more intense than any I’d experienced as a Little Leaguer, but the kids themselves were different. They were fitter and stronger than my teammates and I had been. The kids on my son’s team “hydrated” with Gatorade and ate protein bars. Their physical and technical skills were way beyond those of the twelve-year-olds of my day. Many of them had been to baseball camps, and some played year-round or for more than one team. The players’ and parents’ commitment to the sport was far more significant than it had been in my day.

During the last thirty years, other youth sports have changed in the same way. Many young swimmers train twice a day, putting in ten-thousand-meter workouts and pulling on expensive, high-tech racing suits for big meets. Young basketball players are playing year-round on travel or AAU teams, developing blinding on-court speed, and ankle-snapping crossover dribbles that make college coaches drool.

Whatever the sport, today’s young athletes’ focus on their physical and technical development has elevated the quality of their overall play. But it’s also elevated the expectations these athletes face. And that increased pressure has exposed a gaping hole in these athletes’ training: their mental preparation.

We can train high school athletes to throw a vicious slider or run a mile in under five minutes, but we don’t do enough to help them cope with the mental and emotional aspects of competing at a high level under the pressure of all their elite coaching and training. The result is that a lot of young athletes, despite their incredible skills and fitness, struggle to excel at and enjoy the sports for which they train so hard.

Three Gears Working Together

When I talk about the “complete athlete,” I am referring to someone who has the highly developed physical, technical, and mental tools they need to succeed. Every successful athlete has those three gears — the physical, technical, and mental — and those three gears turn simultaneously. Each gear helps the other two turn more smoothly, and when each gear is contributing, the athletic process seems almost effortless. Think OF Steph Curry darting down an open lane to drop in a floater over his defender. He makes it look so easy.

However, if one of those gears stalls, the other two also get stuck.

As a sports psychologist, I’ve worked with dozens of young players who have excellent technical and physical skills they’ve spent years developing. Their parents have also made significant investments of time, money, and emotional support. During practice, these young athletes can fly around the court or casually line one curveball after another to the gap in center. But during games, something happens. They become tentative. They miss shots they never miss in practice. They get angry and lose confidence. They’re unsure how to react in situations they’ve dealt with hundreds of times during training.

These athletes come to me in frustration. Boys and girls. They’ve spent so much time training and practicing that their expectations of themselves and the expectations of their parents, coaches, and teammates combine to put tremendous pressure on them.

I try to help these athletes find a better balance between their three gears. Most of the time, it’s the mental gear that’s slowing them down, and I help them understand the fundamental components of that mental gear, and how they can strengthen those components. Our goal is to build strong mental mechanics — the thought processes and habits that keep their mental gear sound and reliable. When these athletes can develop their mental game in this way, their cognitive, physical, and technical gears can turn in unison again.

This book will help you develop your mental gear. You’ll learn techniques for handling pressure, controlling your emotions, moving past your mistakes, and building a frame of mind that allows you to excel at and love your sport again. A well-developed mental gear allows you to deploy your technical and physical abilities at the highest level. In addition to preparing you to compete, a finely tuned mental gear helps you overcome the inevitable challenges and setbacks that are part of sports. You want your mental gear to be just as fit, fast, and graceful as your other two gears.

If you become an Olympian or qualify for the PGA Tour, there are all kinds of mental-skill coaches available to you. That’s great. But why should you wait until you’ve already “made it” to address your mental gear? Wouldn’t you prefer to start developing some of the mental skills at an earlier age, when it could do you a lot of good?

The Importance Of Mental Training

I enjoy having athletes as clients. They are disciplined and motivated, and when we work on their mental game, they often see quick results. However, it wasn’t until my own kids started playing sports — and I could see just how advanced the physical and technical training had become — that I realized that society isn’t being systematic about the way we’re working with young athletes. We give them terrific tools for learning technical skills and increasing their physical abilities, but we do nothing about the mental aspects of sports. We just let them figure those out on their own. For that reason, I hope coaches and parents will also read this book and understand that our young athletes need more than training and coaching to succeed.

Yogi Berra was once quoted saying, “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” While Yogi’s math was faulty, his perceptions weren’t: in sports, mental preparation is paramount. Coaches and parents talk about it all the time, but most don’t fully understand it or know how to teach it. There is also a stigma around it. If your kid can’t hit a curveball, you have no qualms about hiring a hitting coach to help them. But if your kid doesn’t do well in high-pressure situations, it’s a sign of weakness. This simply isn’t the case. The athletes I work with don’t have personality flaws or suffer from psychological instability; they come to see me so they can become better, just as they go to the batting cages so their coach can fine-tune their swing.

Every athlete is different. Some players are easygoing and roll with the punches, while others are intense and blow up when they fail. I’ve worked with many athletes who have said at the outset of our work together, “Dr. Pete, I know I freak out when something doesn’t go right on the court, but that’s just the way I am.” I usually tell them, “Well, that’s the way you are now, but we can work at that so it’s not the way you continue to be.”

Out Of Sync

Pretend for a moment you’re a basketball player. Every day you practice your jump shot from the corner beyond the three-point line. An assistant coach works with you, throwing every type of pass imaginable — a perfect bounce pass one time or a hard line drive the next. It doesn’t matter. You catch, square up, elevate, and release, catch, square up, elevate, and release. Every day you work on getting two hands on the ball, squaring up to the hoop, elevating, and releasing the ball. Catch, square, elevate, release. You practice over and over until the motion is as natural as brushing your teeth. Catch, square, elevate, release. The balls drop through the net like they’re being sucked in by a vacuum. Over and over. Your coach is yelling things at you and other players are boiling around you working on their own routines, but none of that bothers you because your job is to catch, square, elevate, and release. Your arms get stronger, your motion gets smoother, and your thoughts, well, they kind of disappear.

There you are. All three gears are spinning in concert.

But when it’s game time, distracting thoughts enter your mind. You think, I hope I don’t screw up or What if my shot is off?You think about that some more. You’re in the lineup because you are one of the best shooters on the team. But what if you miss a few? Will your teammates no longer pass it to you? Will the coach pull you from the game? When the game starts, your shot feels awkward. You hesitate to shoot and instead start looking for someone cutting to the hoop so you can get rid of the ball. Your play slows down. The shots won’t fall and your passes to cutting teammates arrive too late. You react to these events with frustration rather than getting back on defense like you’re supposed to. You’re feeling lost and miserable.

This is your mental gear hindering your physical and technical gears.

One year, the NHL draft was in Chicago, and I was invited to talk to a group of players who were hoping to realize their dream of playing professionally. When you speak to any group of athletes and ask them if they think the mental aspect of their game is important, everyone nods in agreement. I’ve never had a coach or athlete say the mental game is not essential; in fact, they often say having the right mental approach is the most important thing. These hockey players were the same way. They all agreed they needed to have a strong mental game as well as superior physical and technical skills.

I asked these players, “If I told you to work for an hour on your physical skills, could you come back and tell me what you did?” They all said they could. They’d work on their skating speed and endurance, or they’d hit the weight room to build their upper-body strength. “What if I told you to work on your technical skills for an hour?” I said. “Could you come back and tell me what you had done?” They said they could. They’d work on their stick handling or their skating. “What if I told you to work on your mental game?” I said. “Could you come back and tell me what you had done?” The players just sat and stared at me. They couldn’t tell me what they would do. They had no idea.

The hockey players, like most athletes, understood that their mental state — their mental game — affects their performance. They knew it was just as important as — if not more important than — how fast they skated or how they passed the puck. But they didn’t know the fundamentals of that mental game — what the key components of it are, and how to practice and improve those components.

Athletes develop their technical and physical gears by understanding the fundamentals of each of those gears. If you want to score runs in baseball, you have to know how to hit. If you want to stop the other team from scoring, you have to know how to field. Once you know what the fundamentals are (hitting and fielding), you can practice and master the mechanics and turn those fundamentals into finely tuned skills. This is why your hitting coach breaks down each element of hitting and gives you drills to practice those elements. You work on your stance in the batter’s box. You work on torquing your hips for more power. The same is true for your physical gear. Hitters work on their strength and flexibility. They do drills to improve their bat speed and their reaction times.

You develop the mental game the same way. Athletes have to understand the fundamentals — manage your confidence, direct and control your thinking, regulate your emotions, handle mistakes and bad breaks, and maximize your training. These fundamentals of the mental game are turned into skills by developing mental mechanics that can be practiced and mastered.

And as this group of amateur hockey players demonstrated, most young athletes today don’t know the fundamentals of their mental gear, let alone the mechanics for improving and mastering those fundamentals. Through coaching, equipment, and training, we’re helping them develop their physical and technical gears but offering no help with their mental gear. These athletes know their mental gear is crucial, and they talk about it all the time. But they have no idea how to develop it, and neither do their coaches. As a result, athletes and coaches alike tend to overemphasize the physical and the technical gears to compensate for a weak mental gear. This widespread failure to help young athletes hone their mental gear is cheating athletes by depriving them of what they need and want. It’s not enough to tell a player to “hang tough” after striking out. Our athletes deserve better than that.

Mental Mechanics

You build up the strength of your mental gear the same way you develop physical and technical skills. Just as you work out to improve your fitness or do drills to perfect your backswing, you can strengthen your mental gear by practicing proper mechanics.

The mechanics of the mental gear are based on cognitive psychology — the study of mental processes that affect our behavior. The discipline uses the following frame: an event occurs, we consider it, and then we react or respond to it. Cognitive psychologists focus on the moment in the middle — the one before we act — and seek to explain how our thinking influences our responses.

Sports psychologists use cognitive psychology techniques to improve performance. In sports, events happen all the time that prompt athletes to react in some way. Some events, such as scoring a touchdown, are good, while others, such as missing an open jump shot from the corner, are bad. Although good events can trigger a celebration that distracts athletes, most often it’s adverse events that cause our mental gear to wobble.

Pretend again you’re the basketball player we described earlier, our catch-and-shoot, Kyle-Korver-like three-point specialist. It’s game time and you are tight and nervous. You’ve missed your first corner three and you think, I don’t have the right rhythm tonight. When you think that way, chances are you will continue to struggle with your shot. Instead, what if you thought back to your practice sessions? Catch, square, elevate, release. It comes back to you now, that feeling. Catch, square, elevate, release. That cadence gets locked in your head, and all the other thoughts get pushed out. Catch, square, elevate, release. And that’s what you do when the pass comes to you in the corner. It’s quiet in your head, the hoop looks huge from the height of your jump, and your release is as sweet as it is in practice. Swish.

I call this “dealing with the dis-es.” You don’t want to be dis-ed, meaning disappointed, distracted, or discouraged. It’s natural to feel disappointed when you miss. But if that disappointment affects what happens next, that’s a sign of a wobbly mental gear. Your shot is a technical skill, and you’ve worked hard to perfect it. Your jumping height is a physical skill that you’ve also developed. Analyzing a miss and putting it past you so you can be ready for the next shot is a mental skill that you can also develop. Catch, square, elevate, release. Training our thinking in this way is the foundation of sports psychology.

Here’s the point: the way we think affects our performance. If you’re not aware of that, you’ll beat yourself up after a bad play and wonder why your confidence is in the tank. Your confidence will erode because you’ll chip away at it. As you become more aware of how you think — and avoid the thinking that undermines your confidence — you’ll enjoy your sport more and have greater success at it. Just remind yourself, It’s just a miss. It happens. Then take a deep breath and be ready to hit the next one.

It’s Time To Train Your Brain

I recently did a workshop for a team where I demonstrated how the brain controls the body. I tied a small metal washer to a string and held it up by the end of the string for the players to see. My arm, hand, and fingers were still and so was the washer. But then I said out loud what I had started to think. “Circle, circle, circle,” I said in simple and direct language while thinking the same thought. My arm, hand, and fingers remained still, but the washer did what I told it to do: it made a small, slow circle.

Then I began thinking something else and voiced the thought out loud. “This is a stupid idea,” I said. “These guys are probably laughing at me. I never should have done this!” As I said this, the washer quickly slowed and eventually stopped.

This might seem like a clever parlor trick, but it isn’t. I explained to the team that the body is programmed by millions of years of evolution to follow the brain and to do what the brain says. When I was saying “circle, circle, circle,” the nerve endings in my fingers were twitching and tugging and doing whatever they could to follow the strong and direct command my brain was sending. When I began to jam that positive communication with judgment, worry, and doubt, the body’s performance was thrown off track. My mental gear was jammed, and that caused my physical gear to shut down. The washer stopped moving.

This demonstration helps explain why the brain is your most essential muscle. It’s the one your body always follows, and it’s always at work. If you’re serious about your sport, you’re always thinking, whether you’re on the court or on the bench. This is why you need to look at the brain as something you can train.

This book can help you do that. Playing in the BOX is for anyone who understands that the mental game is important, but doesn’t know how to train for it. This book contains techniques that will help you improve the functioning of your mental gear. It will help you understand your mental fundamentals and teach you the mental mechanics that allow you to manage and improve those fundamentals — the same way you go out to the driveway and work on your free throws or go to a park to improve your soccer foot skills.

When athletes are struggling or not seeing the results they want, they typically double down on their training. They spend more hours at the gym or stay after practice. Hard work is always a good idea, but often these athletes are targeting the wrong gear. Focusing on the wrong gear can compound the athlete’s frustration — “I know I work harder in practice than anyone. I just don’t get it!” — and lead to discouragement and a loss of confidence. How do you know when the mental gear needs the extra time? Consider these questions:

1. Do you consistently perform better in practice than in games or competitions?
2. Do you feel your game isn’t improving despite the hard work you put into it?
3. Is your confidence low or inconsistent?
4. Do you struggle to bounce back from a bad play or a bad game?
5. Is it becoming harder for you to get motivated?
6. Are you overly concerned about playing poorly or “choking”?
7. Are you enjoying your sport less than you used to?

If you find yourself answering yes to some of these questions, keeping reading. Like most athletes, you probably need help training your mental gear. Adding mental training might help you more than spending extra time in the weight room or gym.

I also hope this book will enhance your experience as an athlete. I work with a lot of athletes who have a love-hate relationship with their sport. They practice and train so much that when they don’t play well, they feel profoundly disappointed and discouraged. If you’ve had this experience, know that this book can help you navigate those ups and downs in the future. While ups and downs are a natural part of sports, a strong mental game will help you relax and enjoy the ride.

Are you ready to learn how?

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To keep reading, pick up your copy of Playing in the Box: A Practical Guide for Helping Athletes Develop Their Mental Game by Pete Temple.