Mental Preparation Activities In Warm-Ups For Top Performance In Games
Mental Preparation Activities In Warm-Ups For Top Performance In Games
Preparing your brain mentally and breaking a mental sweat in warm-ups
If you’ve been around a sport for any period of time, you’ve probably heard some version of “Wake up!” or “Get your head out of your #&$!”
It’s no wonder why these phrases are used so often in gameplay after mentally grueling warmups like the “Pretzel”:
Alright, joking aside, let’s dive into mentally brains preparing and warming up for competition. It’s key that minds are warm, not just bodies.
Mental Preparation
F1 drivers are peak athletes. They experience crazy amounts of G-Forces and loads of strain on their bodies during a race. Beyond the physical warmup, they are keenly focused on mental sharpness and preparation. A slow start can ruin a race or even worse, cause a serious crash.
F1 drivers memorize the track and their responses before ever entering the track on race day. Their preparation goes something like this:
Study and memorize the track
Study the racetrack on a map
Practice laps within a simulator
Walking the track on race weekend
Practice mentally and physically
Physically warm up with exercise to activate their muscles
Mentally work through a lap
The goal is to imprint the track into their long-term and working memory. Yet, that is not enough! Drivers then work to quickly retrieve that information from their memory and visualize what they are about to experience so they can respond efficiently and effectively.
Just before the race, drivers will rehearse mentally what they are about to see and their responses.
As the saying goes, “you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to your level of training/preparation.”
Applying this to Hockey
Warming up mentally is just as important as warming up physically. Some ideas for hockey players:
Pre-game/Pre-practice visualization, focusing on common situations and your response/process
Reminders/phrases written on your equipment
Eye & head exercises (scanning for relevant information)
Heck, before even heading to the rink… go play a fast-paced video game that forces quick decisions (Call of Duty is accepted).
Challenging the Pretzel Warmup
Okay… I can’t let it go - I have a bone to pick with the coaches that go with the infamous warm-up that is a staple in youth hockey. Here you have:
No decision making
Little player involvement
USA Hockey does regional and national camps as part of its process. It’s a great time and place to experiment (e.g. potential rule changes).
At one of the events, coaches were told no pretzel warmups would be permitted. Here is the creativity they came up with. Pretty similar to what we saw above, no?
Heck, this isn’t even specific to hockey. Here is a local youth football warmup.
Compared with the other side of the field. Can you guess who won?
Hockey-wise, there once was a coach in the NCAA that asked the rink staff to throw out another net for warmup and played small area games.
Warmup Study
In my early coaching years, I did a study of a 7-minute warmup. I’m not going to give you my results (at least, not today), but rather challenge you to track your own and bring back the results to share via social media or email… Seriously, I want to see your results and talk about them!
Decisions made, puck touches, shots, etc.
For example, a pretzel warmup might have a player with 0 decisions and 4 puck touches, and 2 shots. As a community, we can do better.
Further Reading
Did you enjoy this newsletter?
Help us spread the ideas within and share it with the people you care about