Mental training during the season is usually focused on getting your mindset right for the next practice, game, match, or competition. But in the off-season, the focus changes. Off-season mental training is about getting your mindset right for the following season.
I think the off-season is one of the best times to improve the mental challenges and weaknesses you experienced during the season. It’s also a great opportunity to keep building on the strengths that helped you perform well.
The goal is simple: when the next season comes around, you want to be more prepared mentally than you were last season.
To do that, we’re going to look at three areas: identifying your current mental strengths and weaknesses, preparing for the challenges you experienced, and building a daily mental training plan.
Identifying Your Current Mental Strengths and Weaknesses
The first part of off-season mental training is identifying your current strengths and weaknesses. Think of this like an evaluation at the end of the season. You’re trying to figure out what you really want to work on during the off-season.
As a mental performance coach, I view mental training in a similar way to physical training. As an athlete, you probably already think about the physical skills you need to improve. You may look at what you need to work on in the weight room, what speed work you need to do, or what skill work you need to focus on for your sport.
We want to do the same thing mentally. Instead of only asking, “What do I need to work on physically?” you also want to ask, “What do I need to work on mentally?”
The mental side includes things like confidence, focus, responding to mistakes, handling pressure, playing freely, and keeping your thoughts productive during competition. Some of these may already be strengths for you. Others may be areas that held you back last season.
To begin identifying those strengths and weaknesses, ask yourself these questions:
- When did I feel the most confident this season?
- What helped me perform freely?
- What situations caused me to overthink?
- How did I respond after mistakes?
- How well did I handle pressure?
- Was I able to stay focused on what I could control?
- Was I more worried about the result or the outcome?
- What parts of my mental game helped me?
- What parts of my mental game held me back?
These questions are meant to help you reflect on the past season in a useful way. The point isn’t to be negative or beat yourself up over what went wrong. The point is to understand what happened so you can make next season better.
The off-season is about building on strengths and improving weaknesses. That applies to your physical skills, and it also applies to your mental skills.
Once you answer those questions, identify two mental strengths you want to continue using and two mental skills you want to improve during the off-season. This helps you narrow your focus instead of trying to work on everything at once.
For example, maybe one strength is that there were times when you played freely and trusted yourself. Another strength might be that your thinking was more positive in certain games or practices. Those are things you want to keep building on.
Then maybe the two mental skills you want to improve are managing mistakes and handling pressure. Maybe there were moments last season where pressure felt too big, or one mistake caused your confidence to drop. Those are the areas you can begin working on during the off-season.
Preparing for the Challenges You Experienced
The second part of off-season mental training is preparing for the challenges you experienced last season. Once you’ve identified your strengths and weaknesses, you want to start anticipating how you’ll handle those same types of situations next season.
It’s not good enough to say, “I want to be less nervous under pressure next season.” That’s a good goal, but it’s not specific enough. You want to get clear on how you’re going to respond differently when pressure shows up.
This part is more of a thought exercise. You’re thinking through why certain challenges happened last season, how they affected you, and how you want to handle them differently next season.
To do this, get a piece of paper and break it into three columns:
| Challenge from last season | How it affected me | How I want to respond next season |
|---|---|---|
| What situation or mental challenge showed up last season? | How did it affect your mindset, emotions, or performance? | What specific action do you want to take next season when this happens? |
- Let’s say one challenge from last season was making an early mistake. Maybe you made a mistake early in the game, and it derailed your confidence for the rest of the game.
- In the second column, you could write that you became frustrated and started to play cautiously for the remainder of the game. That helps you see the actual effect the mistake had on your mindset and performance.
- Then, in the third column, you would write how you want to respond next season. For example, you might write that you want to take a deep breath, use your reset phrase, and focus on the next play.
The key is identifying the action you want to apply in the moment. You’re not just saying, “I don’t want mistakes to bother me.” You’re deciding what you’re going to do when a mistake happens.
Learning to Respond Differently
A reset phrase could be something simple like, “Breathe, reset, refocus.” You can use that after a mistake to stop yourself from staying stuck on what just happened and bring your attention back to the next play.
Another challenge might be thinking too much about the outcome. Maybe last season you were focused too much on winning, scoring, your stats, your ranking, or what the result would mean. When that happened, it caused you to play timidly, feel more stressed, and compete with more fear.
In the third column, you could write that next season you want to focus on how prepared you are and set specific controllable goals before games. That gives your mind something more present-focused to pay attention to instead of getting stuck on the result.
Controllable goals help you focus on things that are more manageable. Instead of only thinking about the outcome, you’re thinking about how you want to compete, how you want to execute, and what you want to stay committed to during the game.
A third challenge might be worrying about how other people would perceive your play. Maybe you were afraid that people would be mad at you if you made a mistake. That kind of thinking can cause you to overthink and become afraid of making mistakes.
In that situation, the response you want to practice is bringing your focus back to yourself. That means focusing on your execution, your effort, your mindset, and the things you can control.
This exercise is something you can go through one time, but I also view it as an ongoing mental practice. Throughout the off-season, you want to keep thinking through how you want to approach certain situations next season.
Building Your Mental Training Plan
The third part is building your mental training plan. So far, you’ve thought about the strengths you have, the weaknesses you want to improve, and the challenges you want to handle differently next season.
Now we want to get into how you actually train your mind during the off-season.
The way to do this is by using key mental training tools on a daily basis. These exercises help you train the mental skills that are necessary for success, such as being present, building confidence, improving self-talk, and responding better to challenges.
There are four simple exercises I would encourage you to incorporate into your daily routine.
Breathing Exercise
The first exercise is a breathing exercise. This could be a mindfulness meditation or a simple count breathing exercise that you go through every day.
Breathing helps train your mind’s ability to be present. It can also help calm your thoughts and build more awareness of what’s going on in your mind throughout the off-season.
One way to do this is to set a timer for about 10 minutes, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. You can use a count breathing rhythm, such as breathing in for a count of four and breathing out for a count of four.
You can also keep it simple and focus on the natural rhythm of your breathing. The goal is to keep bringing your attention back to your breath.
Your mind is going to wander. That’s normal. When it wanders, you notice it and bring your focus back to your breathing.
You’re training your ability to notice when your mind drifts and then bring it back to where you want it to be.
Visualization
The second exercise is visualization. Visualization is a form of mental rehearsal.
There are different ways you can use visualization in the off-season depending on what you want to work on. If you want to build confidence, you can visualize yourself playing well in the upcoming season.
If you struggled with moving on from mistakes, you can visualize yourself making a mistake, resetting, and then playing well afterward. If you struggled with pressure, you can visualize yourself performing well in pressure situations.
The point of visualization is to mentally rehearse the way you want things to go in the upcoming season. You’re using your mind to practice how you want to perform, respond, and compete before you’re actually in those situations.
This helps build trust and confidence in yourself right now. You’re not waiting until the season begins to start preparing mentally. You’re using the off-season to rehearse the mindset and responses you want to have when the season comes.
Journal Writing
The third exercise is journal writing. I think journaling is a great way to build awareness and help you understand yourself and your thoughts better.
This connects back to the three-column exercise from earlier. You can use that exercise as part of your journaling, where you write down the challenges you experienced, how they affected you, and how you want to respond differently next season.
You can also use journaling in a more reflective way throughout the off-season. You might write about what you’re noticing in training, what thoughts are showing up, where your confidence is improving, or what situations are still difficult for you mentally.
The value of journaling is that it helps you slow down and pay attention. When you write things out, you can usually see patterns more clearly.
Self-Talk Practice
The fourth exercise is self-talk practice. This is where you create a list of positive statements or positive affirmations and read them every single day.
Your mental game is going to improve in direct proportion to how positive and productive your thinking becomes. That doesn’t mean every thought has to be, “Everything’s okay,” or “Everything’s perfect.” That’s not the point.
The point is that your thoughts need to help you. You want to use your thoughts to help you feel more confident, move on from mistakes, focus better, and stay in a better mindset while you compete.
Self-talk practice during the off-season is valuable because it helps you build the skill of thinking in a more positive and productive way. Then, as the season gets closer, those thoughts become more familiar.
Instead of letting negative thoughts take over, you’re training yourself to use thoughts that support how you want to perform.
Connecting Mental Training With Physical Training
The last part is putting everything together. You want to connect your mental training with your physical training.
During the off-season, it can be easy to overlook mental skills while you practice. There usually isn’t as much pressure in off-season training. You may not have the same stress you feel during games or competitions.
That doesn’t mean you need to create fake pressure. But it does mean you should still be intentional about practicing the mental tools you want to use during the season.
One thing most athletes can benefit from is practicing how they respond to mistakes. It’s natural to want to be perfect and to get upset when you make a mistake. But the off-season gives you a chance to practice responding better.
When you train, be deliberate about resetting after a mistake. Even if you don’t feel that upset, practice using your reset routine. If you miss a shot, make an error, swing and miss, or mess something up in training, use that moment to practice resetting.
You can also start incorporating self-talk into your training. This could mean pushing yourself through a tough workout, using self-talk to stay locked in during a training session, or reminding yourself of certain cues while you practice.
The goal is to get more comfortable using self-talk before you need it in a game. If you wait until competition to start using it, it may feel forced. But if you practice it during training, it becomes more natural.
Another important piece is setting controllable goals for training sessions. As I mentioned earlier, controllable goals help take your focus off the outcome and bring your attention back to the present.
You don’t want to only set controllable goals during the season. Start setting them now in your training. These can simply be things you’re working on that day.
The point is to build the habit of focusing in a certain way. You’re training your mind to pay attention to what you can control so that when the season comes, that focus is already more familiar.
This is how you begin building a system during the off-season. You’re combining your mental work with your physical work so that you can trust it will pay off when the season comes around.
Final Thoughts
Mental training in the off-season is about preparing your mind for the next season the same way you prepare your body and skills. You start by evaluating your mental strengths and weaknesses, then you look at the challenges you experienced and decide how you want to respond differently.
From there, you build a daily mental training routine using breathing, visualization, journaling, and self-talk. Then you connect those tools to your physical training so they become habits before the season begins.
The more intentional you are with your mental training in the off-season, the more prepared you’ll be when competition starts again. You don’t want to wait until you’re under pressure to begin working on your mindset. You want to build those skills now so you can trust them later.
But sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what mental skills you need to work on, how to train them, or how to connect them to the specific challenges you had last season. That’s where 1-on-1 coaching can be helpful, because the work becomes personalized to you, your sport, your mindset, and the situations that keep holding you back.
Through 1-on-1 coaching, we will examine your strengths and weaknesses, identify the specific challenges you want to prepare for, and build a game plan for how to train your mind throughout the off-season.
That way, you’re not just hoping your mindset improves before next season. You’re actively working on it the same way you work on your physical skills.
If you want help building a stronger mental game this off-season, click here to learn more about my 1-on-1 mental performance coaching program.
Thank you for reading, and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
