Train Your Brain for Summer Success

Does it feel like your brain is sabotaging your efforts to improve by screaming at you to ease off when you train hard? Here’s the secret to a more successful and confident season

- Malcolm Bradbrook

We’ve all been there, some of us many times over. In the middle of an intervals set when things are starting to get tough and the voice in your head starts to nag: “slow down, ease off, stop”.

Ignoring it can be as tiring as the physical training itself and for some people it can feel almost impossible to ignore the voice as it reaches a crescendo.

But can we train ourselves to ignore it? Is there a trick that sport psychologists use on the likes of Alistair Brownlee and Chrissie Wellington, and can we strengthen our brain in the same way that we build up quads, calves, the core and triceps?

Yes, is the simple answer from top sports psychologist Dr Mark Bellamy. But how to go about it might surprise those expecting a trick or technique.

Mark is one of the most respected sports psychologists in the UK who has worked in elite sport for more than 30 years and supported UK Athletics at three Olympics and Paralympics, including London 2012.

He explains that there is no simple answer and that organisation and planning lie at the route of successfully training your brain.

Mark adds: “You can most certainly train your brain. But of course for some people it’s much, much harder to work at a high intensity as we all have different pain thresholds.

“We also all have different reasons as to why we do things – they’re our drivers and motivators. We need to know what our motivators are and understand why we are in sport and what we are trying to achieve with it.”

Because of the nature of training for endurance of events, we must also get to grips with the concept of delayed gratification. Mark points to an experiment carried out in the 1960s at Stanford University in America.