How I learnt to focus like an athlete

Like most of us, I spent the past few weeks watching Olympic athletes stare fixedly into the middle distance, shout, mutter to themselves and perform a whole range of weird-looking mental preparation techniques before achieving extraordinary feats of physical endeavour. It became strangely obsessive watching these humans with their exceptional bodies battling, first, to manage their minds.
As a lifelong exercise freak, I couldn’t help wondering what elite athlete-style sport psychology could do for my workouts. What extraordinary feat would I be capable of if only I could stop myself from thinking about sausages or space exploration as I perform a lacklustre bench press?
More than anything, I want to be in “the zone”, the perfect state in which to undertake a physical task. Jake Brown, a performance psychologist and the founder of Mindframe Performance, describes it as a sort of athletic trance. “The technical term is a flow state,” he says. “An optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best, we perform at our best, everything becomes automatic, we’re completely focused, time fades away a little bit, we are totally immersed in the moment.”
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One of the most qualified humans on earth to talk about the zone is Jonny Wilkinson, the former England and British & Irish Lions rugby player, most famous for scoring the winning drop goal under unbelievable pressure in the 2003 World Cup final.
Wilkinson now coaches other athletes and owns a kombucha brand, One Living. He explains the zone in terms of a balance of certain key energies. There is the will to succeed; to kick the ball through the posts and win the match. Then there is the joy and curiosity of fully immersing yourself in the act itself.
He says the most powerful mindset to adopt when approaching a physical challenge is to harness your passion and excitement but remain open-minded and curious about what you’re capable of in that moment. Try not to allow the previous times you’ve tried it or possible future outcomes to stand in the way of being fully present, here and now.
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“A productive mental space for goal kicker might be, ‘I’m so excited by how amazing this is going to feel’. Rather than, ‘I need to get the ball over’,” Wilkinson says. The power of a playful, creative approach might explain why we can find ourselves tapping into moments of sporting genius more easily when we are younger or practising a skill alone, he says. But the instant we start to picture an audience, our connection disappears. “All it takes is the thought, ‘Oh my God, what if someone saw this right now?’ and bang, you’re out.”
On the starting blocks and in the warm-up areas of the Olympic Village, there would have been a whole range of approaches in play to achieve this perfect state but it is a fair bet that a reasonable number of athletes were working with visualisation.
“Visualisation is fantastic when learning a new technical movement. Imagery works best when you incorporate all the senses, so that it feels real, you are seeing yourself doing it beforehand which gives it a lot of trust and confidence. The visual sense uses the same part of the brain that’s associated with physical movement,” Brown says.
This approach is perfect for the golf putt, tennis serve or football free-kick, where nailing a movement is key, he adds. “Visualisation gives the false sense of confidence you’ve already done it. It gives you the feeling that you are repeating what you’ve essentially done in your mind.”
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Visualisations are more powerful the more you do them and the more you do them the more vivid they can become. Eight to 20 minutes is ideal for effective virtual training, Brown says.
I decided to try this approach on my summer skateboarding obsession, but sitting and imagining myself successfully swooshing around a skatepark for 20 minutes proved to be extremely demanding. I’m effectively creating one of those training montages from films of the Seventies and Eighties in my mind. I manage five minutes but then I have a real struggle to stick to my narrative of success. It is so much easier to picture disaster. My script keeps shifting from Rocky to Mr Bean.
But once out in the real world on my board, I did indeed sense the start of something. There was an element of feeling as if I’d performed these moves far more often than I actually had and my body was to an extent “remembering” how to turn and shift its weight successfully.
The tendency to imagine bad outcomes can be fought off by a technique called the sensory ladder, which athletes use to take themselves out of their thoughts and back to the present, Josephine Perry, a sport psychologist and author of The Ten Pillars of Success, says.
“If you see athletes looking around or sometimes feeling their clothes, they may be using this,” she says. “The sensory ladder pulls you back to the task and away from thinking, ‘What if I don’t win the medal?’ It involves checking off five things you can see around you, four things you can touch (and you have to describe how they feel), three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. Sometimes an athlete will have mints in their kit bag because it gives them a strong taste.”
I try it during a weight training session. I doubt even the most enthusiastic gymgoer finds the act of lifting dumbbells intrinsically motivating. The primary weight training unit is the rep, and there’s a clue here, you repeat the same simple motion over and over so boredom and distraction are always looming.
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I look at air conditioning ducts, I grab the cotton of my top (starchy) and I drink some isotonic drink (vile) and yes, I’m back in the zone with my next set of lifts. Once I’m there, fully present, it has to be said I really do feel stronger. The temptation with lifting is to be mentally always ahead of yourself, onto the next set, the shower, lunch, numbly performing at about 70 per cent capacity. Sensory grounding really works to push yourself to your max.
What about long runs and bike rides? What about that moment on a 10k in the heat where suddenly an overwhelming sense of absurdity overtakes you? What am I running for? I’m not running fast or well, and no one would care if I just stopped outside this bakery and bought a gigantic cake …
Perry recommends a mantra, a motivating word or phrase. “A motivation mantra is so personal. Mine is about making my daughter proud, my one message if I give her anything to take through life is that when things are hard you get your head down and keep going.” This strikes me as emotionally blackmailing myself for the sake of a Sunday morning plod around the park. I’m in.
My children, now adults, are largely indifferent to my FitBit scores so I concocted something about my oldest friend, the sporting hero of my school still giving it his all to this day. “Do it for Derek” has lovely alliterative music to it and turns out to be fairly magical. He almost appears in my mind, shouting encouragement as I begin to flag.
The zone, I suspect, will remain fairly elusive for some time but having a toolkit to help me get there is genuinely exciting. If you see a bald man tugging at his T-shirt and muttering about an old school friend, just leave him be, he’s probably about to enter a quasi-mystical high-performance state.