Twelve-week mental skills plan for endurance athletes
Welcome to your Endurance Mental Skills Training Program! Developed by sport and clinical psychologist Cory Nyamora, PsyD, and inspired by Matt Fitzgerald’s book The Comeback Quotient. This 12-week program focuses on improving your self-awareness as an endurance athlete and helps you accept, embrace, and address the realities of your sport and life as you train for and compete in your upcoming event. Watch this introduction video to the 12-week mental skills plan featuring Matt Fitzgerald and Cory Nyamora, PsyD
Structure:
The goal of this mental skills program is to help you accept, embrace, and address the reality of whatever your sport brings and in turn be able to apply these skills to whatever life brings your way. This openness to the good, bad, and grey areas in sport and life will allow you to enjoy your sport more and perform your best no matter the circumstances you face.
You will have tasks to complete each day of your 12-week program. These tasks will build self-awareness, bring clarity about your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions as you train and compete, develop healthy habits, and give you concrete skills and tools to enhance your sports performance.
What’s included in the plan?
Endurance Mental Skills Plan Schedule – has the daily calendar of all the activities. It will prompt you to look at the documents below or the videos for more details.
Endurance Mental Skills Exercise Descriptions – provides detailed descriptions of the exercises on the daily calendar by week.
Additional Resources Mental Skills Plan – provides a few extra resources/activities that are optional.
Videos – provide short additional instruction by Dr. Cory Nyamora.
Training Calendar:
There are four different types of activities included in your calendar:
Mindfulness: Activities include breath work and other exercises that help you become more aware of and accepting of yourself, your body, and your thoughts, feelings, and sensations. They also help you see life, training, racing, and other situations for what they are. Some of the activities are also designed to help with relaxation, anxiety reduction, and mental preparation for racing.
Journaling: Activities are intentional, structured questions that guide you to a more intentional self-awareness. They help you develop concrete plans to accept, embrace, and address all aspects of your training and racing experiences.
Training practice: Activities are to be actively practiced while training. They enhance self-awareness, reflection, and active engagement with the positive and negatives of training, racing, and life. They help develop concrete plans for mental fitness and engagement with whatever comes on race day and beyond.
Connection: activities will help you enjoy your training and racing more and impact other parts of your life positively. Because human connection is essential, we are better able to accept ourselves through the practice of sharing who we are with others. It’s important that you begin to include these connection activities in your daily life.