Pressure training and executing skills
What happens under pressure, why we forget to think, and how we can get better at it.
If you tune into any post-match interview with any player on any losing team, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear something like the following:
“Our execution just hasn’t been good enough to be able to compete.”
The above taken from an interview with Ben Stokes during the Ashes series earlier this year. But that’s just the first example that came up when I googled the phrase. Across sport, you’ll hear losing players lamenting their ability to replicate their form in practice when it comes to the main event. It’s worth considering why that happens.
The lazy explanation is to just reach for the P word - pressure - and think that suffices as an explanation. But what is it about pressure, what’s the mechanism, that makes pressure have this effect? And what can we do in training that gives us a better chance of transferring these skills to a match?
Practice is a relatively pressure-free activity. Modern coaches encourage players to experiment, to take risks, to not be too concerned with consequences. Physiologically, pressure-free feels good: lower heart rate, no butterflies, no loss of any fine motor skills through trembling or overthinking. In short, low pressure means no somatic anxiety. We’re free to use the frontal lobe part of our brain - the part responsible for logic, planning, reasoning, and impulse control - to work through problems with technique and come up with solutions. And being able to think things through like that helps us play better.
Under pressure, things are a bit different. We feel all those symptoms that didn’t exist in practice - our heart rate rises and we feel under threat. The perceived threat of failing in important moments, of letting our teammates or our family or our fans down is real; it links back to our evolution where rejection from the tribe meant certain death.
So, under that very real threat, our brain responds as it would have done back then. It cuts out the frontal lobe, and sends signals through the amygdala. Instead of planning, impulse control, and reason, the amygdala gives us different pathways. Fear and threat detection ramp up as our brain scans our environment for more threats and brings up negative memories which strengthen these threatening feelings. Tunnel vision kicks in so that our brain can’t focus on anything that might drag us out of this arousal. The amygdala kicks us into survival mode - fight, flight, or freeze. And none of these are helpful for performance.
So, practice = no pressure = frontal lobe = logic, reasoning and impulse control. Big moments = pressure = amygdala = somatic anxiety and no ability to self-regulate because we’re bypassing our frontal lobe in an evolved response. Ever wondered why players do brain dead things under pressure that we would never do? Ever criticised a player for doing something braindead, for not thinking? Well, they aren’t, in a way. At least not logically.
So, what can athletes do to bridge the gap between low-stakes practice and high-stakes performance? Usually coaches and psychologists create ‘pressure training’, applying consequences to practice in order to get their players into a more realistic mental state. And often, I don’t think they do this very well. I’ve observed some rubbish pressure training before - loser does 10 press ups; loser buys a round of drinks; loser picks the balls up. But we can do pressure training well. We can create pressure in other ways, or we can recreate the physical feelings of pressure:
‘Comfortable being uncomfortable’ sessions. We can force athletes to perform in less-than-ideal contexts, stuff that might drag them into a threat state if they were to deal with in a game. Playing against an extra player in defence; batting on a slope rather than a nice flat surface; bowling with footmarks in the way of your normally pristine training run up. Make people uncomfortable in realistic ways, force players to get used to adapting to it.
Get teammates watching. Never mind buying a round or doing 10 press ups, having peers watching is a threat - remember that evolved fear of rejection? Make players perform the skill with a crowd.
Simulate the physical symptoms of threat detection. The amygdala will engage when the heart rate rises. So run! Do something to get players’ heart rates up first, because under pressure and without logical thought, we will default to doing what we train our bodies to do in a similar state. Learn the skill at 140bpm, and we can replicate under pressure.
