How to Prepare Mentally for Competition

Physical preparation for competition gets planned weeks in advance. Taper the volume, sharpen the intensity, dial in nutrition and sleep. Mental preparation usually gets about five minutes in the locker room, if that.

Most athletes know that their mental state affects performance. Fewer have an actual process for getting their head right before they compete. Here's a simple one.

A mental preparation process for competition day

The night before: pick your anchors. Choose 2-3 process cues you want to focus on during competition. These should be things you control, not outcomes. "Stay low through contact" or "breathe between points" rather than "score first" or "don't make mistakes." Write them down somewhere you'll see them in the morning. Sleeping on your intentions gives them a surprising amount of sticking power.

Morning of: do a quick readiness check. How did you sleep? How does your body feel? What's your energy like? This isn't about judging yourself. It's about being realistic so you can adjust. If you're flat, your warm-up might need to be longer. If you're wired, you might need to calm down before you compete. Knowing where you're starting helps you calibrate.

Pre-competition: run your routine. This is where your warm-up, your focus cues, and your breathing come together. Pick a consistent sequence that brings you from "nervous human" to "ready to compete." It doesn't need to be long. Five to ten minutes of physical warm-up with your cues in mind, a moment to let go of everything except the first play, the first move, the first rep.

Train your mental routine in practice, not just on competition day

The biggest mistake athletes make with mental preparation is only doing it before competitions. If you've never practiced your focus cues or breathing routine during training, you're trying to use an untested system on the day it matters most.

Pick one or two training sessions a week where you run through the full process: set your cues before the session, use your reset moves during hard drills, and debrief afterward. By the time competition comes, the routine is automatic.

Build your competition process

You can keep your cues on a notecard or in your phone. If you want a system that connects your pre-competition intentions to your post-competition reflections and tracks patterns across events, Sherpa is a free app that handles that full loop.