What We Can Learn From the Olympics: How to Train Your Brain Like a Champion

The 2016 Olympics have come to a close. We have borne witness to history, to negotiations of physical limits we didn’t realize were even malleable. We have also seen falls, missed calculations, dashed dreams. Even more than the lifetimes’ worth of punishing daily training and painfully early wake-up calls that happened off-screen, what we saw in the telecast was a competition of poise and confidence—because, as much as anything, the Olympics are a game of mental fitness. “Olympic-level athletes are so incredibly physically trained,” says sports psychologist and founder of HeadStrong Consulting Nicole Detling, who tends to competitors’ mind-sets on-site at the games. “At that level, mental training is what’s going to give you the advantage—a strong mind may not win a championship, but a weak mind will lose one.”

These abilities to quiet the noise and manage anxiety have functions well beyond the Olympic arena—whether before a big presentation or a promising first date. Here, a look at how champions keep it together.

Don’t overthink it.
By the time an athlete reaches the games, the stakes for choking have never been higher. And, according to a 2012 study by Caltech and University College London, the sudden loss of expertise under such mounted pressure can be traced directly to the entirely understandable error of overthinking. In place of leaving the basics to muscle memory, athletes with anxiety will begin to pick apart the minutiae of their technique, allowing the fear of losing to surmount the joy of the sport. “You have to learn how to control yourself first before you can control your performance,” says Detling. Letting your thoughts get stuck on loss is the ultimate misfire. “If you think about losing when you get up to the blocks, you might as well go home,” two-time Olympic gold medal swimmer Garrett Weber-Gale corroborated in an interview. The mere entertainment of losing invites failure into your performance.

Focus on the task at hand—not what it means.
So, too, anxiety management extends to a certain brushing off of the stakes. After Simone Manuel’s gold-winning 100-meter freestyle race (in which she became the first African-American female swimmer to win an individual Olympic medal), she explained that she knew she would only perform well if she actively tried to ignore the fact that she might make history. “I tried to take weight of the black community off my shoulders,” she explained, thus alleviating the pressure to do anything more than swim beautifully, something she’s done her whole career. “The messages that you’re giving yourself have to help the performance rather than harm the performance,” says Detling, who trains her clients to acknowledge their nerves before reminding themselves of their preparedness. “Saying things like, ‘Yes, this is the gold medal competition, but I’ve trained for this my entire life and I’m ready.’ ”

Even thinking about winning can be dangerous for athletes, adding extra strain to an already tense moment. Leading up to Rio, gymnast Simone Biles, for example, kept a journal outlining her goals, which included more consistency on the uneven bars, but remarkably no mention of winning a medal—and she took home five, four of them gold. Later, she explained to an interviewer, “I’m very well at handling pressure. And I just—I don’t know, I don’t put it on myself.”

Visualize.
Focusing exclusively on the task at hand, and visualizing it from start to finish in every possible permutation is the final step for athletic success. Michael Phelps may have earned his place as the Meme of the 2016 Summer Games with #PhelpsFace as he waited for the 200-meter butterfly finals with a furrowed brow, but he also became the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, finishing what may have been his final games with 28 medals. “I was in the zone,” Phelps later explained on the Today show. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen, and he may be the best ever,” said his coach, Bob Bowman in an interview—not of Phelps’s technique or seemingly tailored-for-swimming DNA, but “in terms of visualization.”

When Phelps isn’t doing laps, drills, cupping, or cross-training in the gym, he is step-by-step mentally swimming through his events. “He will see exactly the perfect race,” says Bowman, not just from his own point of view in the water, but also what it looks like from the stands. Next, he will envision unlucky scenarios—goggles snapping, cap coming loose, a late start, perhaps—and he will map out a confident plan of attack for each. It’s likely that this kind of preparation is exactly what separates Mo Farah from getting tripped in the 10,000-meter race and winning from Gwen Jorgensen getting a flat tire in the 2012 London triathlon and competitively throwing in the towel—though, it should be noted that this year she took home gold. What did she credit? Mental training.

Practice mindfulness.
“Yoga and meditation are great for managing anxiety in everyday situations,” says Detling. “Every time you’ve done something really big or really important or really good in your life, you’ve probably had a little anxiety, too. It’s not always a bad thing.” So before your next job interview or public speech, take a power pose for 10 seconds, a deep breath, and follow the lead of gymnast Laurie Hernandez, who just before mounting the balance beam could be seen mouthing to herself, “I got this.”

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