12 Psychological Tricks to Get You Through a Workout or Race
Stay cool, stay fueled, stay focused.
It's the day before Dr. Mimi Winsberg's seventh Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, and race day threatens to be hot and windy. But she has a mantra for the most challenging stretches of the race: "Stay cool, stay fueled, stay focused," recites Winsberg, a psychiatrist in San Francisco who works with athletes and people with mental health conditions. She urges others to develop their own mantra, whether they're novice exercisers or elite athletes. "[Remind yourself] why you're doing it or what you need to do to do it well," she says. Here are 11 more tips for changing your mid-workout mindset from quitter to winner:
1. Prepare.
One of the most reliable ways to get through a tough workout is to build up to it incrementally. If you're training for a competition, the practice should eventually be harder than the performance, says Nick Galli, an assistant professor of health promotion and education at the University of Utah. Appropriate preparation gears up both your body and mind for game day. "You learn, 'Hey, I can handle this pain,'" Galli says.
2. Set the scene.
You can also mentally prepare for a race or workout by visualizing the challenges and picturing how you'd like to respond. In a Journal of Applied Sport Psychology study, using such mental imagery improved swimmers' times in just three weeks. Using your imagination en route has benefits too, says Galli, a certified consultant of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. "Pretend you're some other athlete. Pretend you're running somewhere else that you really enjoy," he suggests. "If you practice it, there's essentially no limit to where you can put yourself."
3. Assess.
You're more likely to hit a mental or physical roadblock during exercise if you don't check in with yourself beforehand, says Sarajean Rudman, a running coach and yoga instructor at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Before each run, she suggests runners ask themselves how they feel and what they need. "That empowers the runner to say, ... 'I need a long run or I need a short run or I need to take day off,'" she says.
4. Separate 'the story' from 'the phenomenon.'
If you're losing steam during, say, a long run, stop thinking about what Rudman calls "the story," or details such as how sweaty and miserable you are, and start thinking about "the phenomenon," or the simple fact that you're moving forward. "[That] frees me up from all of the other stuff that can get in my way and become a huge obstacle, even derailment, during any kind of athletic endeavor," she says.
5. Break it up.
A couple of 5Ks is easier for your brain to swallow than a 10K. Mentally taking on one set at a time is more palatable to the mind than anticipating all 10 sets -- just like running to one lamppost and then the next is more psychologically manageable than running around a block. In other words, tell your mind what it wants to hear and your body will follow suit, Galli says. "Our minds can help us, or our minds can beat us," he says. "So you've got use your mind to your advantage."
6. Tune in.
When competitive athletes feel discouraged, getting in touch with their bodies by focusing on their breathing and what muscles they're engaging can help them push through, Winsberg says. "If you feel you're falling apart mentally, that's a good strategy to bring the focus back into the body," she says. Paying attention to form can also protect you from injury, she adds. "As you're pushing yourself near threshold pace, form tends to fall apart."
7. Tune out.
For recreational exercisers, the opposite technique -- focusing on anything but the workout -- can be beneficial. You may want to work through a problem or recall a warm memory, Winsberg says. For Rudman, counting her steps when she's intimated by a hill during a trail run is a game-changer. "I'm anchoring my thoughts in something that's not stress," she says. "That's been a huge help to get me through things that I think I can't, and then all of a sudden, I'm on the other side and I'm like, 'Oh, actually, I can.'"
8. Be your own cheerleader.
Now's not the time to be humble. Tell yourself anything that inspires you, whether it's that you're strong, well-prepared or even that there's beer at the finish line, Galli says. "[Self-talk] looks different for different people," he says. Endurance athletes, for example, seem to benefit most from motivational phrases like "keep it up," while people involved in more technical sports like golf can get ahead by giving themselves specific instructions, research shows.
9. Know that better is yet to come.
All races and workouts can have physical and emotional ups and downs, Winsberg says. She hit plenty of them during last weekend's Ironman, which included a 2.4-mile rough ocean swim, a 112-mile hot, windy bike ride and a midday marathon through lava fields. "I definitely had a few dark moments during the race," she remembers. But Winsberg told herself that every little bit of effort counts -- and ended up finishing 11th in her age group. "Just because you're in a down doesn't mean there's not an up around the corner," she says. "It's going to get better."
10. Grin and bear it.
If you're not happy and you know it, don't show it. "Studies show that when you smile, you feel more positive and you feel less psychological pain," Winsberg says. During a race, "the more you smile, the more the crowd will smile back," she adds. "It's an easy way to get infused with positive energy."
11. Stop.
If you're injured, severely dehydrated or overheated, give yourself a break. "Not all pain is good pain," Galli says. Burning legs and lungs are expected in long-distance races, for instance, but a sudden, sharp ankle pain could signal a sprain. Tuning into your body more than out can help you better recognize when enough is enough. "If your health is valuable to you, rest has to be part of [the training] too," Galli says.
