Mental Readiness: Warm Up Your Mind the Way You Warm Up Your Body

June 21, 2026

Newsletter Series: Issue 01 of “The 10-1-10”

The 10-Second Version

You warm up your body before every session. Most of you never warm up your mind. That is the gap between a good training day and a great one.

The 1-Minute Version

Walk into a gym on any given day and you will see two kinds of people. The first type arrives already buzzing off their preworkout supplements, music loud, jaw tight, ready to break something. The second type arrives quiet, a little flat, carrying the weight of whatever the day threw at them before they got here. Both of these people have a problem, and it is the same problem; they are not in the right headspace for the session in front of them.

Elite athletes do not leave their mental state to chance. They use deliberate, repeatable protocols to get themselves to that goldilocks place before every performance; not too high, not too low, but just right. The tools are simpler than you think: a specific playlist, a familiar scent, a movement ritual you do the same way every time. These become anchors. Your nervous system ingrains a simple association - when X is present Y is required. Aka, when you do this thing, it is time to compete.

But we don’t live in some perfect world where we can control every variable in our environment, so when the mind inevitably resists and anxiety spikes or focus drifts - you can use three grounding questions that cut through the noise faster than anything else:

Where am I? Right here. In a rack, holding a barbell.
When am I? Right now. Not the meeting earlier. Not tomorrow.
Who am I? An athlete. Someone who does this. Someone who has prepared for this.

Ten seconds of that and you are back in the room. The rest is training.

The 10-Minute Version

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Most training programs are meticulously designed from the neck down. Sets, reps, percentages (or velocities if you’re a nerd like me), rest intervals, periodization phases; all of it is carefully considered to give each session a specific goal and each block specific adaptations. And then the athlete walks in distracted, under-slept, or wound so tight they miss their first lift, and nobody thinks to ask why.

The body and the mind are not separate systems. They are a beautiful integration of a musculoskeletal system that allows for movement, a digestive system that serves as a logistician for both short and long term resource management, a nervous system searching for sensory input to keep the body aware of its surroundings, an endocrine system to modulate the hormonal environment, and a network of feedback/feedforward loops that runs in both directions at all times. What your mind brings to the session determines what your body can do in it. Getting this right is not soft science. It is performance.

Arousal Is Not a Binary

Most people think of mental state in simple terms: focused or distracted, calm or anxious, ready or not. But arousal (the psychophysiological state of activation your nervous system operates at, not what’s going on in your pants) exists on a continuous spectrum, and performance does not peak at either extreme of that spectrum.

The oldest model of this relationship is the Inverted-U: performance improves as arousal increases, peaks somewhere in the middle, and then deteriorates as arousal climbs further. Most coaches intuitively accept this framework, and it is a reasonable starting point. But it has a significant problem: it implies that every athlete has the same optimal arousal point, parked neatly at the centre of the continuum.

Sport psychologist Yuri Hanin's Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning offers something more honest. Hanin's central argument is that peak performance does not occur at a single universal point but within a personal bandwidth, which is in a different place for every athlete based on a variety of factors. The optimal zone is not a fixed location on the spectrum. It is your location, and finding it requires paying attention to your own data rather than borrowing someone else's protocol.

Four variables shift where that zone sits, and understanding all four changes how you approach pre-session preparation:

Skill level and competitive experience. Novice athletes tend to reach their performance ceiling at relatively low arousal levels. For these athletes, beyond a modest activation point, their performance drops sharply. More experienced athletes can sustain high performance across a much wider and higher range of arousal. They have accumulated enough deliberate practice that their technical execution is far more resilient to the noise of a high-activation state. This is why a novice lifter can fall apart under the intensity of a 1RM or competition environment while an experienced one may seem to sharpen. The skill is there in both cases, the difference is how much arousal it can withstand before it starts to break down.

Personality. Introverts and extroverts do not share an optimal arousal zone. Introverts reach peak performance at lower arousal levels, and overstimulating high-intensity environments can push them past their zone faster. Extroverts need a higher baseline activation to get into their ideal arousal level. They are chronically under-stimulated in quiet, low-energy training environments and perform better when the room has some energy in it. This is not a character judgment. It is a neurological difference in baseline cortical arousal. What one person experiences as "exactly right" is what another experiences as either too much or not enough.

Task complexity. This is the variable most directly relevant to strength and conditioning. Relatively simple, high-force skills - such as a machine press, deadlift, loaded carry, or sled push - can be performed at relatively high arousal levels because they do not depend heavily on fine motor control. Complex, technical skills - such as an Olympic lift, a high level gymnastics movement, a sport-specific agility pattern, or even playing an instrument - require a lower optimal arousal level because fine motor precision degrades under excessive sympathetic activation. The same level of intensity that fires up a powerlifter before a squat can completely dismantle an Olympic lifter's snatch timing. This is not a difference in toughness or mentality. It is the nervous system doing exactly what it is supposed to do under high activation - prioritizing speed and force over precision.

What all of this adds up to is one practical directive: stop using other people's protocols and start tracking your own. Rate your pre-session arousal and your session quality for a few weeks. Look for the pattern. The zone where your best sessions cluster is your personal arousal optimization zone. Developing strategies for getting yourself reliably into that zone before the session begins, or how to turn it on reliably when it’s time to perform is one of the highest-return investments available in training.

You Have Already Been Conditioned, You Just Do Not Know It

Ivan Pavlov's original experiments with dogs are so well-known they have become a cultural shorthand. Bell rings, dog salivates. Stimulus, response. What is less often discussed is how directly and automatically this applies to human athletic performance.

Every repeatable element of both your pre-training and intra-training environments are conditioning stimuli. The smell of chalk, the sound of plates, the specific playlist you always train to, even the route you take as you drive to the gym - these are all bells. If you have trained seriously for any length of time, your nervous system has already associated these stimuli with the physiological state of training: elevated heart rate, increased catecholamines, sharpened focus. The stimulus has come to partially produce the response before the training has even started.

This is not a metaphor. It is classical conditioning, and it is measurable. Studies on pre-performance music show that athletes who consistently use the same music before competition show physiological arousal responses to that music even when not performing. The music has been associated with performance arousal so many times that it triggers the response on its own.

The practical implication is significant: you can deliberately design your Pavlovian response. Most athletes let it happen accidentally. They happen to always train at the same time, to the same playlist, in the same clothes. The conditioning occurs but they are not managing it. The better approach is to choose your anchors intentionally:

Sound: a specific playlist, a specific song as the final warmup begins, or even silence if that is your anchor. Consistency is everything. The stimulus only works as a trigger if it has been reliably paired with performance.

For me personally, specific songs right before a max effort set has been the best approach. Just like my body knew during my 20s that hearing “Booty Wurk” by T Pain meant it was about to do some handstand wall twerking in Aggieville - it now knows that “It’s Gonna Be Me” by N’Sync means it’s time to do a 1RM squat, “Many Men” by 50 Cent signals we’re about to do an AMRAP on bench, “Vegeta Royal Blue” leads to a heavy deadlift, and “Not Most Holy” by Vahtang means it’s time for some Olympic skill work. However, this is also the hardest to control at competition. You can’t demand a crowd shut up and let you work just like you can’t stop them from cheering for you as you make your approach. I recommend using the music as a trigger for your build up to the lift and then taking the headphones off to perform if you want to better prepare yourself to take your gym PRs and shatter them on the competition platform.

Smell: the olfactory system has a direct neural connection to the amygdala and hippocampus (nerd speak for the brain regions most involved in emotional memory and arousal). Chalk, ammonia, a specific topical like icy hot, or even the minty scent/taste of gum - these are among the most powerful performance anchors available precisely because the smell pathway bypasses the cortex and hits the limbic system directly.

Ammonia is by far the most common in sports, and has additional physiological benefits since it’s literally used to help revive unconscious people. But back in the day I used to use a Flannel candle from Bath and Bodyworks that smelled really strong and just set that Pavlovian response curve. But be warned, if you choose a scent like that and your romantic partner finds out you may be in store for some unexpected cross-training of excitatory pathways.

Movement: a specific warmup movement sequence, a particular way of chalking the hands, a set number of pacing steps before a lift. Physical rituals anchor the mental state because the brain learns that this specific sequence of movements precedes maximum effort.

I have a pretty routine chalk approach for my lifts that includes chalking my hands as well as my wrists. On each of my wrists I have tattooed the Mandarin characters for Self-Discipline and Inner Strength, because as we learned during the training sequence in the classic Disney film Mulan - both are required to reach your goals. Even if wiping them with chalk doesn’t help my performance directly it still centers my mind and body into the ritual and reminder of the bigger picture.

The discipline required to apply these triggers is simply to be consistent. Use the same anchors every session, not just on competition day. The conditioning builds through repetition.

Two People, Two Protocols

Understanding that athletes exist at different default arousal levels and that performance demands different arousal levels depending on the task point towards two general types of pre-performance intervention.

For the athlete who arrives too low - flat affect, low energy, mentally absent - the goal is to drive arousal up. The tools here include:

High-energy, tempo-driven music with a strong beat (120–140 BPM consistently outperforms slower music for arousal induction in the research literature)
Ammonia capsules or other high-intensity olfactory stimuli
Dynamic movement sequences performed with intention and speed - not as warming up the tissue, but as waking up the system
Self-talk that is activating: "Let's go," "Attack this," "This is what we've been building toward."
Brief visualisation of a previous peak performance - not the upcoming session, but a moment when everything felt right. Let your past success fuel your current stress.

For the athlete who arrives too high - anxious, tight, over-activated, thinking about too many things - the goal is to bring arousal down to the optimal zone without losing the edge. The tools here are different:

Slower, more rhythmic music or silence
Box breathing: 4-count inhale, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4. This is not a relaxation technique; it is a parasympathetic activation protocol. The extended exhale specifically drives vagal tone and reduces heart rate variability in real time
Slow, deliberate movement sequences performed with precision rather than intensity
Process-focused positive self-talk: "What do I need to do right now?" rather than "What if I fail?" Think of 1-2 short technical cues and focus on them while visualizing doing so in training.
The centering questions, described below

Centering: The Three Questions

Centering is a psychological intervention developed in sport psychology to rapidly re-establish attentional focus during high-stress performance situations. The version most applicable to training uses three sequential questions:

Where am I?

This is a literal question, not a philosophical one. Look around the room. Name three things you can see. Name the floor, the ceiling, the bar in front of you. This is a grounding technique that activates the sensory cortex and pulls attentional resources away from internal rumination - the replaying of a bad meeting, the anticipation of a difficult set, the existential questions about your place in the universe - and back toward the immediate environment. You cannot be fully present in your body if your attention is somewhere else.

When am I?

Right now. This moment. Not two hours ago when that driver cut you off in traffic. Not tomorrow where you’re going to mercilessly beat your partner and friends in Settlers of Catan. Right now. The power of this question is that it forces the prefrontal cortex to anchor in the present moment, which is the only moment relevant to the lift you are about to attempt. Anxiety, almost universally, is future-directed - it is the mind running simulations of negative outcomes, often influenced by past experience. This question interrupts that process.

Who am I?

This is the identity anchor. Not an affirmation, not a motivational statement - an identity statement. "I am an athlete. I have trained for this. I do hard things consistently." The answer to this question should come from your actual history, not from aspiration. The goal is to activate the cognitive schema that contains all of your relevant training experience and capability - to remind the nervous system of the person who has prepared for this session, not the person who walked in distracted. If you work better by making that identity into a persona that you inhabit while in this environment, then practice that and make that persona true based on your experience. By day you’re a mild mannered city employee with a middling fantasy football team, but under a few hundred kilos of metal you’re one bad mother “f-er” (like Prince, but with a barbell).

Run through all three questions sequentially and most people find themselves reset within 20–30 seconds. The process works because it systematically re-engages the sensory, temporal, and identity systems that anxiety and distraction tend to disrupt.

Building Your Protocol

The athletes who perform most consistently are not necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who show up to the same internal state the most reliably. That is a skill, and it is trained the same way everything else in the gym is trained: with deliberate practice and progressive refinement.

Start here:

Map your default. For the next two weeks, rate your pre-session arousal (1–10) and your session quality (1–10) immediately after training. Find your pattern. Are you consistently arriving too high? Too low? Does it vary by day of week, time of day, life context?
Choose your anchors. Pick 2-3 anchors - one auditory, one olfactory, and/or one movement anchor. Use them every session without exception. Give it six weeks before evaluating whether they are working - conditioning takes repetition.
Decide your direction. Based on your default, build either an up-regulation or down-regulation protocol. Write it down. Three to five minutes at the start of every warmup, before the first movement begins.
Use the centering questions when you need them. Before a heavy set, between attempts, when distraction spikes. The goal is not to use them as a crisis intervention - it is to make them automatic enough that they happen naturally when the situation calls for them. Remember, you often don’t rise to the level of the moment, you fall to the level of your preparation. Be a wise man, and build that foundation on something hard instead of sand.

The warmup is not just for getting your hips loose, it’s for getting your mind and body right. The session you are capable of on any given day is determined partly by the nervous system you bring to the building. Start treating that as something worth preparing.

This is the first installment of The 10-1-10 — a regular series covering the concepts behind effective training. Each piece is designed to be useful whether you have ten seconds or ten minutes. If something in this one resonated or raised a question, find a coach and keep the conversation going.

Issue 01 of The 10-1-10 | Mental Readiness

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