Getting and Staying in the Zone

By Alice Park

Elite athletes talk a lot about being in the zone, that magical place where mind and body work in perfect synch and movements seem to flow without conscious effort. Major-league pitchers, NBA stars, pro golfers and Olympic hopefuls dedicate their careers to the search for this elusive feeling, devoting hours of training to "listening" to their body and "reading" their muscles--trying to construct a bridge between mind and body sturdy enough to lead them straight to athletic nirvana.

But the truly great athletes, those with long careers and performances that fans talk about for generations, know that maintaining a competitive edge is less about keeping it honed to perfection at all times than realizing they can lose the edge every once in a while and still get it back.

Few athletes know that better than Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson, one of the fastest men on earth. Johnson holds two individual world records in track and five Olympic gold medals. He was the first sprinter to win both the 200-m and 400-m events in a single Olympic Games. He has also had his share of disappointments. He contracted food poisoning a month before the 1992 Games and didn't make it past the early heats in the event he was favored to win. And just before the 2000 Olympics, he injured his quadriceps and failed to qualify for the 200-m race.

Setbacks like those would be enough to put most athletes off their game. But Johnson found a way to push them behind him. "If you have a disappointment," he says, "you need to ask yourself 'Why did I not perform well today?'" Was it the preparation? A mistake in execution? "Then you need to get yourself at peace with that situation," he says.

According to Johnson, achieving that peace is the key to avoiding a full-fledged slump. A slump--that downward spiral that only gets worse the harder you try--is familiar to even amateur athletes. For golfers, it can start with the yips, an uncontrollable twitch of the arm or an involuntary snap of the wrist at just the wrong moment. For a pitcher, it's the strike zone over home plate that suddenly begins to jump around. For the basketball player, it's the hoop that has inexplicably shrunk.

Athletes in the throes of a slump will swear that it came all of a sudden, out of nowhere. But psychologists say the episodes are less mysterious than they seem. They usually stem from a failure to prepare mentally for the pressure of athletic competition. "Training is about strengthening the mind-body connection," says Kirsten Peterson, sports psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee. "Athletes need to train their mind with the same discipline that they train their bodies."

The mind-body connection in sports is not some New Age construct. Thoughts have direct and powerful connections to all sorts of physiological functions. Think hard enough about jumping out of an airplane, and your heart will start to race and your palms to sweat. Other thought-induced changes may be more subtle, and for athletes who rely on fine motor skills, those imperceptible adjustments can mean the difference between a strikeout and a home run.

At the root of most slumps is a perceived decline in performance. Athletes tend to define themselves by their results, and any dip in their stats can make them start to think they are not as good as they used to be or as good as they thought they were. In some cases, they may not be slipping at all; their opponents may just be getting better. Or the decline may be a matter of perspective; after all, no one can perform at peak levels 100% of the time. Over-training and bringing the muscles to the brink of fatigue can lead to a physical plateau, after which the body just can't run any faster or swing any harder.

What elevates any of those scenarios from an ordinary off day to a prolonged slump is the way the athlete interprets the dip. "It has less to do with what is contributing to the decrease in performance and more to do with how you react and adjust to the decline," says Jonathan Katz, a psychologist at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Much of the action takes place without the athlete's even being aware that it's occurring. After years of practice, hitting a baseball or shooting a basket becomes almost second nature to a professional athlete. So it's easy to think the skill resides in muscle memory. But even those rote actions involve a tremendous amount of mental processing; they are just happening too fast for the athlete to realize they are going on. "It's not the conscious kind of processing, the kind where you're thinking about how to control your body," says Jeff Simons, a sports psychologist at California State University, East Bay. "Our conscious brain cannot keep up with the speed of information processing necessary to perform a high-level skill."

Any learned sports skill begins in the thinking part of the brain, with nerves in the prefrontal cortex. As those neurons get excited, they activate nerve cells connected to the limbic system just under the cerebrum of the brain, the area associated with emotions such as fear, anxiety, elation and satisfaction. That area is tied in turn to the motor cortex, which controls the muscles.

If the feedback loop is dominated by fear--fear of failure, fear of disappointing teammates, fear of being unworthy--the circuit starts to resemble the classic fight-or-flight response. In the perform-or-perish version, anxious thoughts trigger the release of adrenaline, the hormone that sets the heart racing, primes the muscles to run and puts all the senses on alert. The eyes slip into tunnel vision--the last thing a quarter-back needs when he's relying on peripheral perception to spot a waiting receiver.

One way experts help athletes control the jitters is by teaching them to take command of the interior monologue that psychologists call self-talk. This is the endless conversation that we all have with ourselves, processing events as they pass before our eyes. The average person speaks to himself at a rate of 300 to 1,000 words a minute. According to Trevor Moawad, director of mental conditioning for IMG Academies, a leading sports-training facility, that means that for a tennis player competing in a typical 2-hr. match, only about 40 min. are spent on the court contesting points, leaving an hour and 20 min. between points with little to do but talk to oneself. Positive chatter can help the athlete stay focused, but if the conversation strays into fears of failing, then the self-talk can become counterproductive.

"You can't stop those negative thoughts from coming," says Michael Johnson, "especially when you enter an arena or when you see your competitors walk by. The only way to stop those thoughts is to replace them with something else." For Johnson, the substitute images and words were all about the race ahead. "If you're going to replace them, you might as well replace them with something that's going to help you," he says. He liked to visualize the upcoming race, concentrating on the start, the weakest part of his race, and thinking about himself shooting off the blocks like a bullet.

Aynsley Smith, director of the sports-medicine research center at the Mayo Clinic, gives her athletes a more tangible system of thought swapping. "I tell them that self-talk exists on three channels: positive, negative and escape. You try to be on the positive channel as much as you can while you're training or competing, but when the negative thoughts start coming, it's the speed of the transition that counts. I give them a clicker pen and tell them to just click over from the negative to the positive channel." If the anxiety doesn't go away, says Smith, then it's time to switch to the escape channel. That's for thoughts about how the athlete's role model would react. How would Joe DiMaggio get over the disappointment? What would the Babe do?

Smith, who works with ice-hockey players, finds that biofeedback techniques are particularly effective for controlling jitters. Most athletes are skilled at visual imagery, and when shown monitors that display their anxiety levels as a graph or chart, they quickly learn to corral their nervousness and keep it from interfering with the smooth flow of their practiced skills. "I tell people they need to try to get back to doing rather than thinking," says Simons.

Relaxation techniques like deep breathing are also good for helping athletes quiet the mental chatter long enough for their bodies to perform. "You have to help them realize that 'I have to get out of my own way,'" says Simons. "Relaxing can help them imagine competing, getting in their own groove, feeling it, tasting it, reminding them of that feeling of flow."

For Michael Johnson, who competed in three Olympic Games over a span of a dozen years, avoiding a slump was mostly a matter of staying in control. "The first thing an athlete has to realize is that you are always in control," he says. "And you need to maintain that control." Control, that is, of both the body and the mind.