Every coach has seen an athlete perform exceptionally well in practice but struggle in competition when the stakes are high. In recent research, 77% of athletes report experiencing performance anxiety within the past year (Mesagno et al., 2024).
In this post, we will explore how coaches can prepare athletes for high-stakes moments through pressure training to reduce competitive anxiety and help athletes perform when it matters most.
Competitive Anxiety
Competition anxiety occurs when athletes perceive a situation as stressful and doubt their ability to cope effectively with the demands they face. Beyond just feeling stress, competitive anxiety also involves psychological and physiological arousal. Arousal is often needed for good performance, but when paired with anxiety, a high dose of arousal can lead to excessive worries and nervousness and physical symptoms like rapid, shallow breathing, clammy hands, flushed faces and butterflies.
Symptoms like these can hinder performance as they negatively impact an athlete's psychological and physical readiness.
Sources of Competitive Anxiety
Why do athletes have competitive anxiety?
It often results from a competitive stressor. A competitive stressor is the demand related to performance that an athlete feels they may not have the skills to overcome. Stressors can be classified into three categories: organizational, competitive and individual (Ford et al., 2017).
- Organizational stressors come from the sport organization, team, or environment in which the athlete competes.
- Competitive stressors are demands directly related to competition itself.
- Individual stressors come from within the athlete or from their personal circumstances and experiences.
Whether an athlete has competitive anxiety depends on how they evaluate the competitive stressor and whether they believe they can cope with that demand (Karageorghis & Terry, 2011).
This evaluation happens in three steps:
- What coping options does that athlete have available? This can be a range of psychological skills such as muscle relaxation, confidence, concentration, positive self-talk and emotional regulation.
- What is the likelihood of those coping options being effective? At this stage, the athlete must decide which mental skills will be more effective for coping with the demand. For example, a swimmer may feel increasingly tense before an important race and has to decide if muscle relaxation or self-talk would be more effective to help them reduce their muscle tension.
- Can they employ the coping method effectively? Once the athletes choose which skill will be most effective, they need confidence, knowledge and ability to use their coping method effectively. Just knowing that mental skills exist does not mean they can successfully apply those skills under pressure.
Pressure Training
Pressure training is one strategy that coaches can use to help athletes effectively cope with competition stressors. Pressure training involves exposing athletes to relatively small developmentally appropriate stressors while simultaneously teaching and rehearsing coping skills (Collins et al., 2016). The goal is to prepare athletes for competition by gradually exposing them to manageable levels of stress and helping them learn how to respond effectively. By facing stressful situations, athletes build resilience through repeated exposure and through increased confidence in their ability to cope effectively with competition demands.
Pressure training involves four steps (Karageorghis & Terry, 2011):
Step 1: Help Athletes Recognize the Signs of Competitive Anxiety
An important skill for athletes to learn how to overcome competitive anxiety is being able to recognize when they may be anxious. Each athlete is unique so anxiety symptoms will be different for everyone. However, common symptoms include:
- Physical: Pounding heart, sweating, muscle tension, increased breathing rate, butterflies in the stomach.
- Cognitive: Poor concentration, fear, indecision, loss of confidence
- Behavioral: Playing too cautiously, excessive talking, avoiding eye contact, nail biting, lethargic movements.
Helping athletes recognize these symptoms is the first step toward managing them effectively.
Step 2: Teach Effective Coping Skills
To cope with demands, athletes need to develop a toolbox of coping strategies. They must also learn how to recognize which strategy is most appropriate for a given situation and apply it effectively. Coping strategies include both problem-focused skills and emotional-focused skills. Problem-focused skills focus on changing the source of the competitive stressor. Emotional-focused skills involve managing the emotional or physical response to the stressor. Effective coping is about teaching athletes how to identify which skills to use, when to use them, and how to apply them effectively.
Step 3: Practice Under Pressure
In this step, the coach creates challenging practice situations for athletes to apply their coping skills. It is critical to understand that just making drills more difficult does not create meaningful pressure that mirrors competition. Difficulty can help an athlete improve their sport-specific skills but not how to manage stress. Rather, there are many strategies for introducing pressure in practice:
- Competition simulation: Recreate game-like conditions by using rankings, officials, pre-performance routines, spectators and other realistic competition settings.
- Forfeits and Rewards: Create meaningful consequences for outcomes, such as team responsibilities, rewards or privileges that increase investment in performance, such as cleaning the gym, preparing team dinner, getting water bottles for other players and bringing snacks.
- Unfairness: Introduce perceived injustices such as uneven rules, deliberate bad officiating or having fewer players on one team.
- Stronger Competition: Have athletes compete against older or high-level opponents by finding tournaments at about the team's level or scheduling scrimmages against challenging opponents.
- Task Restrictions: Add time limits, public evaluation or other constraints that increase pressure without changing the skill or activity being practiced.
- Distractions: Use visual or auditory distractions such as crowd noise, music, spectators, a scoreboard and having people walk across the athlete's line of sight.
- Location Changes: Practice in stadiums, unfamiliar venues or less-than-ideal environments where athletes may feel additional pressure.
Step 4: Debrief and Review
The last step is to allow athletes to reflect on how they cope with pressure and analyze their emotional and behavioral responses to stress.
This is a central feature of pressure training as it helps athletes connect the pressure they felt in practice to potential competition scenarios.
Some questions a coach can ask during the debrief include:
- What did you notice about your thoughts and behaviors when pressure was increased?
- How did the pressure affect your performance?
- What coping strategy did you use, and how effective was it?
- What would you do differently if you experienced the same situation again?
- How might this type of pressure show up in an actual competition?
- What is one thing you will take from today's practice into your next competition?
Key Considerations
When introducing pressure training, consider the following guidelines:
- Gradually introduce pressure training: Do not have athletes jump right into high-pressure situations. Instead, start with smaller levels of pressure and increase over the season. Research shows that practicing under mild anxiety has a positive impact on performance under high anxiety (Oudejans & Pijpers, 2010).
- Include athletes in planning the pressure scenarios: Have athletes define the stressors they feel in competition and potentially strategies for recreating those stressors. Including them in the process makes the activity more meaningful, improves their sense of autonomy and increases buy-in.
- Be aware of the potential negative outcomes: If not properly planned and implemented, pressure training can decrease confidence through repeatedly poor performance under pressure. Reduced motivation can also occur if there is too much pressure that decreases the athlete's enjoyment. Do not surprise the athletes with pressure. Instead, discuss your plans for increasing pressure in practice. This helps the athlete prepare for increased pressure.
Pressure is an unavoidable part of sport, but athletes can learn to handle it more effectively. Coaches can help by teaching coping strategies and regularly practicing under realistic conditions. Effective pressure training is gradual, purposeful, and paired with reflection.
When done well, pressure training can help athletes develop confidence, resilience, and the ability to perform when it matters most.
About the Author
Dr. Jennifer Roth is an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology.
She teaches courses in the Applied Sport Sciences online graduate programs. Her research interests include coach education, online teaching and learning, positive youth development through sport, and modified youth sports.
She has consulted with the United States Tennis Association and has worked as a sport psychology consultant for numerous teams and athletes.
References
Collins, D. J., Macnamara, A., & McCarthy, N. (2016). Putting the bumps in the rocky road: Optimizing the pathway to excellence. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1482. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01482.
Ford., J. L., Ildefonso, K., Jones, M. L., & Arvinen-Barrow, M. (2017). Sport-related anxiety: Current insights. Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine, 8, 205-212. https://doi.org/10.2147/OAJSM.S125845.
Karageorghis, C.I. , & Terry, P.C. (2011). Inside Sport Psychology. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781492595564.
Mesagno, C., Hammond, A. A., & Goodyear, M. A. (2024). An initial investigation into the mental health difficulties in athletes who experience choking under pressure. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 74, 102663.
Oudejans, R. R., & Pijpers, J. R. (2010). Training with mild anxiety may prevent choking under higher levels of anxiety. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 11(1), 44-50.