Tips on building a strong mind

Our friend Wil Fleming released a new book in November: Strong Mind: A Weightlifter’s Guide to Focus, Confidence, and Resilience Under the Bar. As a former elite hammer thrower and weightlifter, a shockingly bad performance at the Olympic Trials changed Fleming’s outlook on the mental side of training. This has helped him significantly as a coach, and now he is sharing his learnings with others as well. He then joined us on last week’s podcast to dive into the topic as well.

I’ve always said that much of what is taught in sports psychology is too far separated from the sport itself. Laying at home and visualizing your sport in bed is great, but we also need to acknowledge it is a world away from performing under pressure as you step on the platform with thousands of fans watching. It might help, but there is more to the process.

Elite performance is about bringing coordinating putting together all the facets in the right context. All the factors of elite performance are highly contextual. You don’t just need strength, you need strength you can apply in your sport. You don’t just need technique, you need technique you can replicate under pressure. You don’t just need speed, you need speed you can call upon under fatigue. The same is true with the mental side. You don’t just need to be “mentally tough,” you need to have that strength to find focus when everything is pulling your attention away from what matters the most.

The most mentally prepared athletes bridge that gap, and much of what we talked about on the podcast was how mental preparation can be integrated into physical preparation to help find context. Central to that is the role of the coach.

Below are a few key tips and thoughts from Fleming about building mental strength.

1. Building mental strength

A lot of coach’s lament that mental toughness is either something you have or you don’t. Ironically, those same coaches are often the first to pull out Navy Seals inspired training to try and toughen up their athletes. The reality is that it is a skill. Like any skill, some are inherently better. But everyone can train it and improve. As Fleming notes:

“Nobody’s born with a great squat. Nobody comes out like squatting 600 pounds, right? Same with mental strength. It is a skill. You gotta teach ’em how to do it. It’s something that you can build.”

2. Defining mental toughness

I mentioned mental toughness already, but let’s take a step back. What exactly is it? Is it the ability to just grind away? The ability to try hard things? Not exactly.

“Being mentally tough isn’t just being fearless. Mental toughness is: can I get rid of the distractions, I can put the noise away and all those doubts that creep in. It is the ability to just focus on what’s actually important when it matters.”

3. Framing threats vs. opportunities

As we talked about on the podcast, some of the toughest athletes in training often fast the biggest challenges in competition. A lot of it comes down to how we frame competition: is it a threat or is it an opportunity? This reminds me of the great anecdote from Olympic champion Szymon Ziolkowski about how he fell down in warmups, but framed that as his competitive advantage that led him to victory. As Fleming put it:

“If you go into a meet and you’re worried that if you do bad, that meet has now become a threat to you. Right? But if you go in saying: this meet is an opportunity for me to show off my hard work, demonstrate the hard work I’ve put into training, it’s an opportunity for me to beat that kid from this school or, you know, all these things are opportunities.”

Part of the framing is about control. To see it as an opportunity, athletes need to be feel control: “You want to equip athletes who are ready to fix stuff, right? It’s under your control. So you try to get them in this mindset: Problem arises, I can fix it. Problem arises, I can fix it.”

4. Finding the individual approach

The interesting thing about focus, control, and mental strength is that it is very individual. As a result there is no optimal approach here, since each athlete is different. Understanding that is the ultimate key to success in coaching and mental strength:

“In sports psychology there’s this idea of individual zones of optimal functioning. The IZOF and like athletes are different. Some athletes are super intense, others are calm and cool. You gotta understand that both are fine. You just have to figure out which one’s right for your athlete.”

» Related content: learn more from Fleming as we interview him on HMMR Podcast 326.