5 Mental Drills Any Team Can Start This Week

You don't need a sports psychologist to start training your athletes' mental game. You don't need a budget, a new hire, or a single extra minute of practice time.

What you need are a few proven techniques that athletes can practice on their own — before school, during study hall, or at home — in five minutes or less.

Here are five drills pulled from sport psychology research that any team can start using this week. Each one trains a specific mental skill, and each one gets more powerful with daily repetition.

1. The 60-Second Reset

What it trains: Focus recovery after mistakes

The problem it solves: An athlete makes a bad play, and the frustration follows them into the next one. And the next one. One mistake becomes a streak because they can't let go.

The drill:

How to practice: Athletes run this drill mentally 3 times each morning using past mistakes as scenarios. "Remember that dropped ball in Tuesday's game? Recognize, release, refocus." By game day, the reset becomes automatic.

Why it works: This is a simplified version of what sport psychologists call the "10-Second Rule" — the idea that you give yourself 10 seconds (or less) to feel the frustration, then you move on with intention. By rehearsing it daily with real memories, athletes build a neural pathway that fires automatically under pressure. It becomes a habit, not a decision.

2. The Mental Highlight Reel

What it trains: Confidence, pre-game preparation

The problem it solves: Athletes show up to games hoping they'll play well instead of expecting they will. Their confidence is passive — dependent on how warmups go or how the first few plays unfold.

The drill:

How to practice: 3–5 minutes before bed or as part of a pre-game routine. Athletes should rotate their highlight moments weekly so the reel stays fresh.

Why it works: Visualization activates the same brain regions as actual performance. When athletes replay successes vividly and in first person, they're reinforcing the neural patterns associated with confident, high-level play. Research consistently shows that athletes who visualize success before competition perform better than those who don't — even when physical preparation is identical.

3. The Focus Lock

What it trains: Attentional control, blocking distractions

The problem it solves: Athletes lose focus during competition — distracted by the crowd, the scoreboard, an opponent's trash talk, or their own wandering thoughts. They're physically present but mentally somewhere else.

The drill:

How to practice: Once daily. Track how many times focus wanders — athletes will see the number decrease over days and weeks.

The game-day version: Before competition, athletes pick one sport-specific focus point — the seams on the baseball, the rim of the basket, the lane lines in the pool. During play, if attention drifts, they snap back to that anchor point. This is their "Reset Word" in action: a mental cue ("LOCK" or "HERE" or whatever word they choose) that triggers an immediate return to the present moment.

Why it works: Attentional control is like a muscle. This drill is the mental equivalent of bicep curls. Every time an athlete notices their mind has wandered and brings it back, they're strengthening the neural circuits responsible for sustained focus. After a few weeks of daily practice, the ability to maintain focus during distracting, high-pressure moments improves dramatically.

4. STOP & Replace

What it trains: Self-talk management

The problem it solves: Negative self-talk destroys performance from the inside out. "I always miss these." "I can't handle pressure." "The whole team is watching me screw up." These thoughts feel like observations, but they're actually instructions — the brain treats them as commands and acts accordingly.

The drill:

How to practice: Athletes journal three negative thoughts they caught during the day (practice, school, anything) and write the replacement for each. Over time, the STOP response becomes automatic — they catch and replace negative self-talk in real-time without conscious effort.

Why it works: This is cognitive restructuring — one of the most well-researched techniques in sport psychology. The key insight is that thoughts aren't facts. They're mental habits. And like any habit, they can be interrupted and replaced. The journaling component is critical because it builds awareness: most athletes don't even realize how much negative self-talk they're generating until they start tracking it.

5. The Pre-Performance Routine

What it trains: Consistency, composure, game-day readiness

The problem it solves: Athletes perform inconsistently because their mental preparation is inconsistent. Some days they show up locked in, other days they're scattered. There's no system — just hoping for the right mindset to appear.

The drill:

Build a simple 3-step routine for the 30–60 seconds before a key moment (a free throw, a pitch, a serve, stepping into the batter's box, lining up for a play):

How to practice: Athletes run through their routine before every rep in practice — not just games. The routine only becomes automatic if it's been done hundreds of times. By game day, it should feel as natural as tying their shoes.

Why it works: Pre-performance routines are one of the most consistently effective tools in sport psychology. They work by creating a repeatable transition from "thinking mode" to "performing mode." Research shows that athletes who use consistent routines before key actions perform more consistently and show greater composure under pressure. The routine creates a buffer between the chaos of the game and the focused execution of the skill.

The Common Thread

Notice what all five drills share:

• They take 5 minutes or less. No schedule overhaul needed.
• They're done by the athlete, not the coach. This isn't more work for you — it's more work for them, done on their own time.
• They build with repetition. Like any training, the first day doesn't transform anyone. But daily practice over weeks creates measurable changes in focus, confidence, composure, and resilience.
• They're proven. Every drill here is based on techniques used at the highest levels of sport — adapted so any high school athlete can start using them immediately.

Want the Full Program?

These five drills are a starting point. My Mental Gym takes these concepts — and many more — and structures them into a progressive 24-week curriculum that athletes follow through a mobile app, 5–10 minutes a day.

The app walks athletes through each drill with daily instructions, explains the science behind every exercise, and builds skills progressively so that by the end, athletes have a complete mental performance toolkit they own for life.

Coaches and ADs can track engagement and progress through a dashboard. The whole athletic department is covered for one flat annual price — $1,499–2,499 depending on school size.

But you don't have to start there. Start with these five drills. See what happens when your athletes train the mental game with the same discipline they bring to the weight room.

The results tend to make the next step obvious.

Jeff Ashmore is a Certified Sport Psychology Coach (CSPC) and the creator of My Mental Gym. Visit mymentalgym.com for more, or email info@mymentalgym.com to start a pilot program.