We breathe in the clean, crisp air of Lake Tahoe.  Five seconds in, five seconds out. Keep breathing.

A voice yells out over the microphone: “Spartans, are you ready?”

A resounding “AROO, AROO, AROO!” comes barking out from me and fifty others at the starting line.

I give a fist bump to my three friends joining me on this psychotic voyage and we take off to climb the mountain.

Heading into a performance or competition can be daunting. Our minds drift towards the unknown, the unpredictable, and the ‘what ifs’. This creates a lot of tension and fundamentally a lack of presence of mind to what were supposed to be doing. In most cases this is because athletes focus too much on the outcome. Having an outcome focus has been linked to excessive muscle tension, anxiety, and worry. This makes sense because the outcome is totally out of our control. Yet, we spent so much cognitive energy trying to change it.

Do you put in the work behind the scenes to train your mind? Well you should. Why? Because that’s what all the top performers and performers striving to make it as professionals are doing. Ok. I want to train my mind. What does that mean?

Imagery is a great tool many athletes use before competition. It's amazing because it gets your mind ready for action. A mental warm up. You use the same part of your brain when you imagine something as when you're performing the action in real life. How can you use imagery to enhance your performance?

With the 2018 World Cup just wrapped up, it becomes apparent that teamwork is important. Many of the best teams in the world, favorites to win the competition were knocked out by teams representing small countries. How were the team relations within these smaller teams including Uruguay, Croatia, and Belgium?

Mental performance (or sport psychology), the most recent addition to elite performance and human development is a crucial ingredient in the recipe for the path towards excellence and mastery. In this article, you’ll learn what sport psychology is and isn’t, what the main goals are, what the benefits of doing mental training are, what some of the most potent mental skills are, and how athletes work on these skills.