The Mental Edge: How To Boost Your Performance Through Mindset Mastery

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Elite athletes understand the importance of nutrition for optimal performance. Food, drink, vitamins, and supplements energize the body to train and compete.

Of course, some food sources are better than others. If you feed the body junk, your body won’t perform efficiently or optimally. For example, I wouldn’t recommend an athlete to eat a bucket of fried chicken and drink several litres of Coke before a competition for obvious reasons.

That is why many athletes enlist sports nutritionists’ services to understand better what to feed themselves, what to avoid eating, and how to optimize fuel use. A nutritionist often starts this process with a nutritional needs assessment.

A Lesser-Known Energy Source

One energy source often flies under the radar. I’m not talking about some performance-enhancing herb found deep in the Amazon. The energy source I’m referring to is called mental energy.

Mental energy is a general mood that affects whether you feel productive, motivated, and prepared to get things done.

Let’s examine the workings of mental energy and a needs assessment to fuel yourself for optimal athletic performance.

What affects an athlete’s mental energy level?

Similar to biological energy, mental energy relies on what you feed it. Those “mental food sources” are called thoughts. Your thoughts affect your mood, which either increases or decreases mental energy.

In other words, your thoughts or expectations about your athletic circumstances stir emotions. Positive emotions boost mental energy, while negative emotions deplete your energy stores.

How does mental energy affect athletic performance?

Mental energy plays a significant role in fueling your ability to:

Make quick decisions
Block out distractions
Process details in the moment
Manage physiological processes (muscle tension, energy stores, blood flow, oxygen consumption)
Stay on task

In competition, an athlete experiences some degree of stress: either eustress (positive stress) or distress (negative stress).

When you think of a competition as a challenge, you begin to fuel your body and mind to “go for it.”

Alternately, when you fear what might happen in a competition or see the event as a chance to fail, your energy sources kick into overdrive, and you become too amped up or anxious. After a while, you experience mental fatigue. Think of it as ingesting a pound of sugar. You first experience a sugar high followed by a rapid sugar crash.

The Healthy Mental Diet

To maintain a sustained, optimal energy level, feed yourself productive thoughts. Those thoughts can be positive affirmations, encouraging cue phrases, game strategy reminders, calming thoughts, etc.

Review your past performances if you are unsure of a healthy mental diet plan. You can gain much information and feedback from your best competitions and so-so performances.

In competitions where you fell apart, were you feeding yourself anxious thoughts? Conversely, did you provide yourself with thoughts of calm and confidence in your best performances?

The goal is to feed your mind healthy thoughts, “I got this, let’s go for it,” instead of junk food thoughts, “I’m a loser, I’m going to get crushed.”

Mental Energy Takeaways

Create a pre-competition mental diet. Ask yourself, “What thoughts energize my performance?” “What thoughts have a calming influence when I get too hyped?” “What thoughts help me re-focus when my mind drifts?”

Always remember optimal performance requires you to feed your mind as you should feed your body.

Coach Michael

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