Author: Ian Reardon
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Choreographing Your Thoughts: Mental Cueing Pre-, During, and Post-Performance
Every athlete trains their body with structure. Workouts are built on sets, reps, intervals, percentages, and progressions. Yet when it comes to the mind, many athletes rely on hope. They hope they think the right things in big moments. They hope their nerves stay quiet. They hope they can focus when it matters. The truth…
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Finding Flow: How Athletes Build the State of Peak Performance
Every athlete has chased that moment when everything just clicks. The ball seems to move slower, your movements feel effortless, and you react without hesitation. You stop thinking and start doing. In that zone, every decision and every movement feels natural. That experience is called the flow state, and in my work with athletes I…
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Training Your Mind Like a Muscle: A Framework for Mental Performance
Athletes do not stumble into strength. They build it through steady work, repetition, and consistency. The same truth applies to mental performance. If you want to perform at your best in any arena, your mind must be trained with the same discipline as your body. At The Mental Barbell, we believe mental skills are not…
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Own Your Game: The Power of an Internal Locus of Control in Sport
Athletes live in a world full of variables they can’t control. Referees make bad calls, weather conditions shift suddenly, teammates make mistakes, and sometimes an opponent simply plays better. It is natural to point toward these factors after a loss or ‘failure’. Doing so eases disappointment and allows the athlete to feel that circumstances, not…
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Optimism and Mental Toughness: Give pain a purpose.
The Role of Optimism in Mental Toughness Mental toughness is often romanticized in sport. We picture the athlete who digs deep in the final moments, pushes through the pain of training, or comes back from injury stronger than before. But what actually makes that possible? At its core, mental toughness is the ability to initiate…
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Get the Information, Forgive Yourself, and Play On: Turning Mistakes into Fuel for Performance
Mistakes are not the enemy of athletic performance. They are the raw material of progress. If you want to grow in your sport, you must face the reality that mistakes are not only inevitable, they are essential. They tell you what needs work, they direct your training focus, and they prepare you for future adversity.…
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Your Thoughts Aren’t Facts: How to Reframe Negative Self-Talk
Imagine you’re walking down a busy hallway and someone shoulder-checks you as they rush by. No eye contact and no apology. Instantly, your mind jumps to a conclusion: “What a jerk.” You feel tension rising in your chest, frustration in your face, and you carry that irritation into the next few hours of your day.…
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How to Build a Pre-Performance Routine That Works!
You’ve probably seen it before: the basketball player who spins the ball in their hands the same way before each free throw. Michael Phelps slapping his back across his chest while getting ready to race. The lifter who takes the same number of breaths before every attempt. To the outside world, it might look like…
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Know Your Zone: Understanding Your Productive Emotional Mix
This is Part One of a three-part series on mastering your Individual Zone of Optimal Functioning (IZOF). In this first article, we’ll explore how to identify the specific emotions, pleasant or unpleasant, that support your best performances, and why intensity matters. In Part Two, we’ll help you build an early warning system to recognize when…
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What Happens in a Mental Performance Session?
Mental performance training isn’t as visible as physical training, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Athletes and coaches know what it feels like to have a strong mental game: focused, composed, and confident. But most don’t have a plan to train these skills. That’s where this work begins. Starting with the Athlete’s Experience…