Developing a High Performance Mindset for Action Sports
If your passion is in action sports, then you already know how hard it is some days. Finding the energy, overcoming fear, committing to a trick, or just having the consistency on tricks you can normally do during a contest, can all be a frustrating situations. In this article, we’re going to look at the importance of high performance mindset training for action sports like skating, surfing, bmxing etc.
This very nature of having to overcome fear to succeed at a trick regularly is what keeps us coming back for more. It’s what makes it so addictive. However it can also be tough, and striving for progress is a long road. We’re going to have a look at how you can approach different areas of your sport and how to adjust your mindset to improve performance.
Our Mindset is made up of 4 key areas:
Cognitive Processing – How we think, problem solve, process ideas, respond and approach things.
Our Attitudes.- How we feel about things and think about them.
Our Beliefs – Do we believe we can improve, do we have a growth or fixed mindset?
Our Expectations – Do we expect a certain outcome.
With this in mind, let’s look at 4 areas of performance and think about improving your cognitive, attitude, belief and expectational approach to each of them. This will help you develop a high performance mindset. Our beliefs determine our actions, and our actions determine our results. By not setting limits on our beliefs, our beliefs expand with what’s possible and the previously considered impossible, becomes possible.
High Performance Mindset for Training
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. The more times we repeat a single movement or a trick, the more our body is cementing the neural pathways for that movement. The strategy here is to train tricks so then we can do them consistently. Think about trying to land a 360 flip 100 times in your skate session and not leaving until you’d achieved it. This is the sort of approach and dedication that made Paul Rodrigues and Mike MoCapaldi so incredibly consistent. Rodney Mullen (from his biography ‘The Mutt’) stated that he would practice his freestyle routine until he could do it with his eyes shut. This helps to give you peace of mind in the knowledge that you can do these tricks with your eyes shut, or by pure instinct.
Under Pressure. They say we don’t rise to level of our expectation, but fall to the level of our training. So if you have tricks that you’re hoping to do in a contest, or when the filmer has his camera out, replicate this pressure. Don’t practice them in a quiet relaxed environment. Try training with added bits of pressure such as a busy time at the park, early in the morning when you’re feeling a bit slow, late in the evening when the light is just fading, when it’s windy, when it’s hot, when it’s cold. All of these elements will find you in competition or on the streets, so train to be ready for them rather than hoping you can perform.
Tim Ferriss, author, investor and podcaster revealed that when he was practicing for his Ted Talk, he would down 3 shots of coffee and then do a read through. Why? Because he knew as soon as he stood on stage he’d start sweating and his heart would race 3 times as fast, so he practiced his talk in that state. Prepare your mind to perform even when the body is feeling the stresses.
Our approach with training is to train in difficult situations, so our mind is more confident when we reach the course.
Failure
Welcome Failure. As action sports athletes this one tends to come pretty naturally to us. Tricks take a long time to learn and we deal with failure a lot, but don’t ever stop welcoming this failure. Make it a daily ritual to thing positively about what you failed at today and reframe it as knowing you were pushing yourself hard enough. Repositioning the concept of failure in your mind will help you to keep progressing and be less judgemental to yourself when failure does occur. It’s about altering our cognitive processing of this failure to allow for more development.
You can also apply this to contest strategy for any event with runs or laps. Consider what you will do if you fail at certain points by not landing a trick. How do you regain composure, speed and flow in your run? Practice your run with missed tricks and pauses. Practice waiting 2, 5, 10 minutes between attempts and work on switching your mind into gear quickly. The more prepared you are, the more your mind can relax. The hard work is done, it is just time to perform.
Visualisation
What we repeatedly think, we become. If we visualise ourselves falling, failing, and never making it, we will believe that. We all know how much we fall apart when we start thinking negatively. Luckily the opposite is also true, positive thinking, and more importantly visualisation, can help us succeed. We can apply this in 2 ways.
The Micro – Learning tricks through visualisation. Watch footage of someone doing the trick or picture the trick as vividly as possible in your mind and let it play over and over again. Think about the way your body will move and feel. The sounds the trick will make. The air rushing past you. Visualise every tiny detail in your mind. This will help prepare the body for the reality of trying the trick.
The Macro – Long term goals and competition. You can apply visualisation to an entire event or day of competition. You visualise the day from start to finish, from stepping out of bed, making breakfast, driving to the contest, right up to lifting the trophy above your head.
Emptying the mind & Flow State
The pinnacle of high performance is being in a flow state. Flow is the opposite of distracted. When we are in flow we are completely focussed. Every distraction falls away.
There are a number of triggers we can use to enter a flow state. One of the easiest and most applicable/common in action sports is fear. It’s hard to think about anything else when you’ve thrown yourself off a 20 foot ramp. Fear is a flow trigger because flow follows focus, and focus follows consequences. When we are in the zone, or in flow state, we are laser focused. This type of focus can help create incredible leaps in performance, so finding ways to spend more time in the zone can rapidly increase our progression and performance.
We can also use music or breathing to help put our bodies into a more focused state. It’s why so many skateboarders wear headphones even when competiting. It is there way of controlling an input and using it to help them focus.
We’ll do some more articles about flow soon as it’s a huge and complex topic but hopefully this gives you some ideas and something to start with.
If you’re keen to talk more, drop us an email or reach out to us on Instagram @esm.australia and we’re always keen to talk performance.
Until then, stay focused, stay positive, and get after it.
