Issue 016

August 2006

By James Barraclough

Again touching upon the subject of concentration (as per my last two articles), this time I will look at a few very basic organisational routines that can be used to improve your focus. As with the majority of sport psychology, what I will describe is often touted as common sense and merely ‘formalised’, i.e. It is written down and stuck to, rather than just being something that is floating around in your head. The process of writing it down is one simple way of organising and improving concentration- there is a saying in psychology that “to organise is to remember”. It is all about being thoroughly prepared, and to throw another saying at you “if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail”. The two ways of improving concentration I will look at in this issue are pre-competition plans and pre-performance routines.

Pre-competition plan

A pre-competition plan is simply just a way of making sure that things go smoothly and developing a set procedure for how you prepare, both physically and mentally, in the few days or weeks (or however long you want) before a competition. It ensures that your time is spent doing the ‘right’ things, and that any nasty surprises can be dealt with. I ask my clients to brainstorm as many things that could possibly go wrong in the week or so before a competition (such as your car breaking down en route) and come up with solutions for these (such as making sure car is maintained and that you are in the AA!). These may seem obvious, but it always good to have contingency plans for anything that can go wrong. My clients are then asked to plan their preparation for the time immediately before the contest, based on what has (or has not) worked for them before, and what the coach and sport psychologist think needs to be included. This is quite straightforward and an example is shown below:

Physical

Day Before

Sleep/rest

Prepare kit

Reading/relax

Preparing to leave

Double check kit

Arrival

Relax

Stretch  

Be around positive team-mates

Warm-up

Kit ready

Right state of mind

Mobilise joints

During

Deal with distractions

Mental

Day Before

Perform Imagery

Listen to music/ watch videos of favourite.fighters 

Preparing to leave

Play music that sparks an emotional response

Arrival

Get feel for place

See where you will be fighting

Warm-up

Positive imagery

Positive self-talk

Positive thoughts

No negatives

Wake up!

Be aware of arousal levels (relax or activate?)

During

ENJOY IT

Clear mind of ‘chatter’

Faceless opponent

SELF-TALK

Be aware

CONCENTRATE

Maintain focus and.control

The above should be quite self-explanatory when completed with the help of a coach and sport psychologist. It works well when combined with a check-list in ensuring that nothing is left out of your preparation. 

Pre-performance routine

Another way of improving concentration is to develop a ‘pre-performance routine’. Probably the most famous of these in sport is ‘doing the Jonny’. Before every kick, the rugby player Jonny Wilkinson will adopt an unusual stance with his hands together. It is thought that a routine like this can help focus the mind on the task in hand by letting the brain know that they are about to execute a certain skill. It can be seen as a kind of prompt by the body for the brain. For a sport such as MMA, you could standardise the pre-fight/competition warm-up as a way of programming the mind into realising that this physical routine means “I am about to fight”. 

For anyone who knows anything about basic psychology it is similar to Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov rang a bell every time he fed the dogs- when they had become conditioned to associate the bell with being fed, they salivated whenever the bell was rang, even when there was no food present. This shows that certain ‘cues’ or routines can help prepare you mentally for what you are about to do.

To give you a more relevant example for MMA, I used a pre-performance routine recently with a client in combination with a relaxation technique known as ‘centering’. My client learnt the centering technique over a six week period, starting with a twenty minute period deep relaxation over two weeks, then reducing this to a five minute relaxation period (suitable for pre-competition if needed) over the next two weeks, and then finally refining this further to something that could be applied within five seconds during a competition itself. With the final phase, I asked them to focus on a certain part of their equipment (in this case a logo on their kit) and associate this with the relaxation technique. This enabled them not only to relax, but also to regain focus when they became over-aroused or distracted. As with many interventions, the above can also be used in conjunction with other techniques. In the above example my client also used self-talk as a re-focus tool. In the next issue, I will explore this further and look at self-talk, a very popular sports psychology technique, in more detail.