Mental toughness in sports needs to be viewed as a trainable skill. It is something you can and must develop. And to develop it, there are certain mental toughness exercises you can use.
As a mental performance coach, I work with athletes on building a strong mind. One of the key ways we do this is through the use of repetitive exercises.
When there are physical skills you want to improve within your sport, you identify drills that will build those skills. Then you make use of repetition to engrain the skills in muscle memory.
The same approach is taken to building mental toughness in sports.
There are mental skills you must have in order to be mentally tough. Once we identify what skills are needed, we then shift our focus onto exercises that build those skills.
There are many exercises you can use to build mental toughness in sports. Below I have outlined my top 5 favorite mental toughness exercises you, as an athlete, should be practicing on a daily basis.
With the first one being the exercise of reframing your thoughts.
Mental Toughness Exercise #1: Reframing
Your thoughts are the foundation of a strong mental game. Without good control over your thinking, it is very difficult to be mentally tough.
The first part of gaining more control over your thinking is recognizing negative/unhelpful thoughts in the moment. The second part is changing those thoughts as quickly as possible.
Reframing takes care of both.
Reframing as an exercise involves writing down negative and unhelpful thoughts and then reframing them into positive and productive thoughts.
Here’s an example of how this would go:
- Negative thought: “I suck right now.”
- Reframing thought: “Learn from it and get the next one.”
Your thoughts strongly impact your emotional state and your physical play. If you are down on yourself and feeling negative, that will not translate to a strong emotional state or high level play.
It is also not a recipe for strong mental toughness.
However, if you are able to have better thoughts, your mental toughness will grow.
In addition to writing down your negative thoughts and reframing them, you also want to get into the habit of reframing in the moment. This is what will have the biggest impact on your immediate performance.
A great example of reframing in action comes from a triathlete I worked with.
He was on the run phase of his race and his body was worn down.
In the past, this is where his negative thoughts would have taken over. But leading up to the race, he had been practicing reframing. He had equipped himself with the tool he needed in that moment.
Instead of allowing the negative thoughts to slow him down, he quickly changed his thoughts in the moment. Reframing them from negative to productive, and finishing the race strong.
For yourself, to build mental toughness in your sport, begin practicing reframing. Both as a written exercise, and also as an in the moment tool to manage negative thinking.
Mental Toughness Exercise #2: Mindfulness
If an athlete’s mind is all over the place, shooting from one thing to another, would you consider them mentally tough? If they struggled to focus on what they were doing, they couldn’t move on from past mistakes or let go of future worries, would you classify them as having a strong mind?
When your attention is not under your control, it controls you.
When your attention controls you, this leads to underperforming in games.
Attention is directly linked to sports performance anxiety and fear of failure. Two mental game challenges I see in many athletes and ones that will do nothing but hold you back.
The reason both challenges are linked to your attention is because when you think about the future or dwell on the past, fear and worry form.
But what if you can let go of the past and not worry about the future? What if you can play with a mind centered in the present moment?
That is where you find peak performance.
One characteristic of all good performances is a mind centered in the present moment.
A mentally tough athlete has control over their attention. Control that is trained through the mental toughness exercise of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is a state but also an exercise. The state is one where your awareness is completely centered in the here and now. You are present.
The exercise of mindfulness is where you practice focusing in the present moment.
The idea is, you center all of your attention in the present. This will typically involve you focusing on your breathing. Then, what will naturally happen is, your thoughts will wander.
When you notice your thoughts have wandered, bring your attention back into the present moment. So back onto your breath.
That is how you practice being mindful.
Now there are two activities you can do that facilitate this practice of mindfulness: mindfulness meditation and a mindful walk.
For mindfulness meditation, you sit down and close your eyes and focus on your breath. And as I said, when you notice your attention drifting away from your breath, return it as quickly as possible. You’ll do this for at least five minutes.
A mindful walk is similar, except, instead of closing your eyes, you will focus on your breathing with your eyes open while walking.
A mindful walk is great because you can incorporate the training exercise into your day to day life. Whenever you walk somewhere alone, try turning your attention onto your breath and practice being in a mindful state.
Mental Toughness Exercise #3: Self-Evaluation
How do you view mistakes? Do you see them as something negative or as a way for you to learn and improve?
Mentally tough athletes see mistakes as ways to improve. It’s not that they want to make mistakes, but they do not get too down on themselves and beat themselves up over the mistakes they make.
In addition to moving on from mistakes, mentally tough athletes also know how to push themselves. Taking an objective view of their game and recognizing areas that need improvement.
Both of which are accomplished through a self-evaluation practice.
A daily mental training exercise you can do is evaluating yourself and your performance for that day. This can be done for training days, practice days, and game days.
When you do your daily self-evaluation, you aren’t doing so in order to pinpoint faults. That would be counterproductive to building mental toughness.
You equally don’t want to only focus on what you did well that day, as you will not be reframing mistakes like you need to or identifying ways to improve.
When you evaluate yourself, you want a nice balance between seeing what you did well and examining mistakes and how you can improve.
This balance is accomplished through two simple questions:
- What did I do well today?
- What can I learn from today?
Answer both of those questions at the end of each day. Doing so ensures you are evaluating yourself and your game in a productive way.
Mental Toughness Exercise #4: Mental Rehearsal
A key mental skill you need to be mentally tough is confidence. Without trust and belief in yourself, it’s easy to allow doubt and fear to occupy your mind.
Doubt and fear eat that away at your mental strength.
The more confidence you have, the less fear and doubt impact you.
A great way to build confidence is through mental rehearsal. Mental rehearsal is an exercise where you imagine yourself performing your skills. It uses visualization to build the memory of success.
The more you mentally rehearse your skills, the stronger your trust becomes.
For example, if you are a boxer and you mentally rehearse an upcoming fight every day for a month, imagine how much more confident you’ll be when you step into the ring.
That’s exactly what one boxer I worked with experienced recently. Confidence grew due to mental rehearsal.
That’s using mental rehearsal as a way to visualize the way you want a performance to go.
There are other ways you can use mental rehearsal to build mental toughness as well. With one being mentally rehearsing yourself responding to mistakes.
Reacting negatively to mistakes and having them distract you increases your chances of making more mistakes. Mentally tough athletes, while not happy about making mistakes, can move on quickly from them.
With mental rehearsal, you can visualize yourself responding to mistakes the way you want. This builds a subconscious belief and works to form the habit of responding to mistakes in a way that sets you up for more success in the game.
By using mental rehearsal, both for building confidence and responding to mistakes, your mental toughness will grow.
Mental Toughness Exercise #5: Performance Objectives
Think about a mentally tough athlete. How would you describe their focus?
Are they easily distracted, or do they seem fully focused, no matter if it’s a training session or a big game?
Mentally tough athletes are focused. They have control over their mind and know how to center their attention on what’s happening right now, in the present moment.
A great tool you can use to not only strengthen your focus in the moment, but also increase focus over time, is setting performance objectives.
Performance objectives are targets or cues you set for yourself that are 100% within your control.
The way the exercise works is you set two objectives a day. One mental objective and one physical objective.
For practices and training sessions, your objectives will involve what you want to work on that day. This provides you with intent.
For games, your objectives will involve what you need to focus on physically and what mindset you need to be in to help you play your best.
Performance objectives are all about controlling your attention. When you provide yourself something controllable to focus on, it’s much easier to keep your mind centered where you want it.
Instead of allowing your mind to wander from one thing to the next.
Use performance objectives to keep yourself focused. Because a focused athlete is a mentally strong athlete.
Final Thoughts
Every athlete wants to be mentally tough. But mental toughness isn’t something you’re born with. It needs to be trained!
The way you train mental toughness as an athlete is through the development of mental skills.
To build mental skills, there are many exercises you can use. With five great ones being:
- Reframing
- Mindfulness
- Self-Evaluation
- Mental Rehearsal
- Performance Objectives
Begin using these exercises on a daily basis as a way to build your mental toughness as an athlete. Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
