Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Performance plateaus are those phases in an athlete’s training cycle where the momentum once driving continuous improvement fades away. This can happen after a cycle of grueling preparation for a big event, after a rest break, or after coming back from an injury.

It’s very frustrating for parents, coaches, and athletes to face a performance plateau. As a result, this frustration can often exacerbate the problem by driving athletes to overtrain. Consequently, the athlete starts working harder, but fails to work smarter to get their mojo back.

Overcome an Athlete’s Performance Plateau with a Cycle of Mental Skills Training

If you are a parent, coach or athlete experiencing this frustrating cycle in which hard work stops paying off, then I have one suggestion. Work less on developing physical skills and spend more time developing mental skills. Indeed, it’s easy to overrate the value of working on physical skills, especially when facing a performance plateau. However, this is the time where you want to focus more energy developing mental toughness and resilience.

Developing mental skills is not less work in terms of time and difficulty. However, it’s easy to undervalue working on mental skills because there are no physical signs of blood, sweat, and tears. Don’t let this illusion confuse you. The most important thing for athletes to develop when the signs of overtraining and performance plateaus become clear are mental skills.

Obviously, I’m not saying that physical skills are not important, they’re just not as important as you would think for overcoming performance plateaus. Instead, athletes need to focus the bulk of their time working on skills such as:

• Controlling the sources of confidence
• Strategic thinking,
• Controlling anxiety and focus,
• Self-talk, and
• The four domains of emotional intelligence

If you would like more information on how I can help facilitate this process of training mental skills to breakthrough a performance plateau, please contact me here.