| Warm up should be a period of getting into optimum readiness for competition, can become a moment of lost opportunities, or even worse - a time of stress and anxiety.
Order from the Chaos
Warming up can offer a time for mental preparation, planning strategies, tactics, and even stress control. During your warm up, you can accomplish many things that will help you in your performance.
But how can you be sure that you warm up properly and cover all of your needed concerns? By developing a ritual, or a specific way of doing things. We all have special, customized ways of doing things. By organizing and following through with your special procedures, you develop a comforting system of preparing for competition.
What Do You Need?
It is easy. You just need to get things organized in a comfortable sequence. What do you like to do to get ready? Think about it, then repeat the same routine every time. Use your ritual to transform... from anxiously waiting competition, to being well prepared and ready to go.
Design Your Own Ritual
Take a few minutes and decide exactly what you would like to do. Get it in your mind what you want to do, what you need to do, and when to be ready for your competition. Lay out a plan in a step by step fashion. Then practice it. Many athletes like to listen to music as part of their ritual. Some listen to easy listening music to relax and calm them down prior to competition, and others like to get pumped up. Just decide what you need to get you ready.
Your Ritual is Your Friend
Use your ritual to prepare yourself for competition. Get lost in your preparation. Everything becomes automatic as you go from step to step. No outside worries or concerns. Just focus on your goals, and get your mind and body ready. By entering your ritual, you retreat to a comfortable place, one that you are familiar and comfortable with. No matter where you are, you can enter this "place" where you feel good, and you know what is happening. Use your ritual to cue yourself to get into your zone.
Final Thoughts
There are many things an athlete can do to help control stress and to prepare yourself for competition. The development of a precompetition ritual will help you control stress, and yet prepare you for the demands of competition. Take the time to determine what you need, design a definite ritual, then use it. By ritualizing your precompetition tasks, you help yourself shift into automatic, you become comfortable with where you are, and you stop worrying about unneeded concerns.
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