Over the years I have been involved in and have delivered a whole variety of pre-activity warm ups. Now I say here pre-activity, because although warm ups are associated primarily with sports competition, they also take place in every area of performance - from music and the arts, to business presentations, right down to simple activities in everyday life.
The generally accepted idea is that this area of preparation falls into two distinct categories - physical and mental. Certainly in the area of sports and teams I have worked with this has been so and, while I used to treat them as distinct almost to the extent of being mutually exclusive, I now work from the premise that the quality of mental readiness is the best thing to drive both the quality AND the effectiveness of the physical warm up.
The mental preparation, the mental warm-up, starts in the changing room; however - the quality level of mental readiness starts long before any individual or member of a team enters that changing room. The purpose of the mental preparation is to then view the level of readiness and recognise what the next step is.
So where do I, as a mental performance coach, fit into this scenario for my players?
Well, it used to be all from the premise of state management and how best I could bring each player into managing their own state from moment to moment. With individuals this was more impactful, because of the depth of our rapport and the "intensity" of my guidance. Now with teams it was much harder to deliver and was dependent upon the numbers in the team. Although it was generally effective, there would be occasional periods of synchronicity - amazing moments of collective zen - where the team almost behaved in one unified state. In these times they achieved everything the processes they were executing were intended to do.
The thing was, I was always looking for more effectiveness in what I was doing for them - searching for things that would bring a level of more consistency in their ability to access and maintain good states of mind, and, dare I say, even regularly capture more of those pure flow or zen moments.
It was, certainly in the sporting side of my work, rather like the search for the holy grail!
I watch an inordinate amount of high level competitive sport - not so much for the spectacle or the partisan involvement - but rather for the sheer nature of what the competitors are doing, how they are doing it, and - most especially - how their ebbing and flowing states of mind are being played out in terms of their physical manifestations. The viewable part of their mind-body link, if you like.
Robots and Love
Now if these competitors were unemotional robots then the outcome of these contests would be down to which cybernaut had the best physical and tactical attributes. Since the statistical data of the robots would be measurable and known beforehand - there would probably be no real purpose in playing out the competition to see who is best - it is a given. The only thing that would bring the contest to life in meaningful terms would be the pleasure, the love, of playing the game. Of course robots have no comprehension of emotions such as pleasure and love - and therein is the reason why we, as humans, really play sport. It's about play, pleasure and love - all really powerful and positive human emotions.
Now my teams and players are not robots, so THE most overriding reasons for them playing their sport is for pleasure - for the love of it. What brings them to any contest (or even any practice session) is the sheer love of the game, and the next closest reason is the common bond of association with the people that are also involved.
If you think about motivation to practice; going to the gym or jogging on a dark, wet morning; or right down to something as mundane as ironing (almost!), there has to be love in there somewhere. Love of the activity or play; love of neat and smooth clothing; love of ourselves and what's best for us and feeling good about ourselves. If love isn't overriding all other emotions then we are less inclined to do something.
Baggage
Now, although this vehicle (love) brings the players to this particular sporting encounter, they also bring their individual mental states - their 'baggage'. This baggage, like all baggage, can be of various sizes and contain a whole variety of things, issues, concerns, feelings etc., all things that go to make up their mood. In terms of a rugby team this will be (including substitutes) 18 different sets of baggage with 18 different sets of contents. So a mental warm-up needs to take account of this and, in essence, bring some alignment for the players in terms of pointing them in the same direction, (orientation), and get them singing from the same hymn sheet, (attunement).
Now for me to talk as they all sit listening is a very 'mainstream' way of doing things - even though many of the things I might say to them are 'off the wall', from a maverick mind-set, and so on.
Mainstream context, maverick content.
The difference came for me when I decided to double up on maverick, by taking a totally different line in terms of context. In my article called "Off The Wall" I explain some of the immediate details. (see February 2012 archive).
The key, I've found, is for them to (1) acknowledge the fact that their baggage is going to get in their way if they take it onto the field of play, and they'll trip over it or take their 'eye off the ball' in order to negotiate their way around it. In addition (2) for play to really have a purpose in terms of their love of it, they need to engage with that love.
Once that connection, or reconnection, is made then the mental warm-up is done - and the rest of the warm-up (physical) can be as short or as long as circumstances will allow or as I deem to be relevant. The thing I've found is that the physical warm-up should just be to awaken muscles and joints and re-familiarise players with certain technical or tactical processes.
Mistakes will happen in physical warm-up and these, dare I say it, are good for players who are in a high mental state. At this level players will view mistakes and errors as opportunities to make fine tunings and adjustments to those processes. They are not taken as being indicative of "not being switched on" or "lacking focus". They are merely bodies being woken up to the weather or pitch conditions, and levels of attunedness of the physical 'machines'.
When those same players make mistakes in the physical warm-up and they are not in a good mental state, there is a wide range of individual and collective self-criticism - because when in a low mood players will only recognise errors as being indicative of a lack of readiness, a lack of care, a pointer towards playing badly. And we all know what stations those particular trains of thought are heading for!
I also think of warm-ups as not just being pre-match. There are instances in the match where play pauses and then re-starts. Half times, drinks breaks, changing of ends, end of rounds, injury stops etc - these are all opportunities for warm-ups. They are all distractions in terms of the players' concentration and focus, so why not re-orient that concentration by deciding that all re-starts need some form of warm-up? Makes sense doesn't it!
Don't give it a second thought
In a recent match my rugby side were 17-0 ahead and needed one more try for a bonus point. With less than ten minutes left in the game the opposition scored. Now, several times in the past I have seen sides become almost paralysed by their own poor reactions to such a scenario - and these lads have been no exception. I can almost recite the script running through their thoughts, "We've let them score. If that happens again they'll catch us up and we'll have thrown this game away..." They then proceed to act out the script and "throw the game away".
On this occasion I was able to talk to them in a huddle as the opponents' kicker was taking the conversion. The point I made was that at 17-5 (or 17-7 if his kick went over) and less than ten minutes to go, it didn't matter whether they scored again or let alone how we might feel about that. The only REAL thing that mattered was that we needed one more try for a bonus point - and that everything we did between now and the final whistle should be focussed on that alone. I reminded them of their LOVE for what they are playing and who they are playing with. They scored with less than 3 minutes to go, secured the bonus point and their opponents were eclipsed without my players giving it a second thought!
Conclusion
Warm-ups are hugely relevant to performance and need to be effective rather than functional. They need to be flexible - and whoever runs them and however they are run, there needs to be an understanding of mental readiness and an engagement with the binding purpose that puts players at their highest level of mood or state of mind.
When we put thought into our warm-ups we need to be mindful of what that contains. When we put no thought in at all the warm-ups become robotic and, as we know, robots and humans (with all their emotions) are literally poles apart!
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