My left side has a habit that taught me more about performance than any book. If I stop watching it, it works. If I start thinking about it, it seizes. A stroke when I was ten left that side weak and prone to spasm, and for decades I have noticed the same thing in the boat, on the bike and in a dozen other places: once a movement becomes automatic, my left hand does what it knows. The moment I supervise it, the spasms arrive.
I used to think that was a quirk of my injury. I now think it is a very exaggerated version of something that happens to nearly everyone who has trained hard for anything. This piece is about the gap between what a trained body can do and what it does on the day, and about the thing that mostly decides how big the gap is.
§ 1 · Capacity and state
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.
Here is a way of picturing a performer that I find useful. Split the person in two. One half is capacity: everything talent and training have built into the body, the strength, the skill, the conditioning. The other half is state: how settled or frayed you are at the moment it counts.
I like to picture them as multiplying and not adding. A world-class capacity in a frayed state gives a middling result. The same capacity in a clear state gives something close to your best. The picture explains something every coach has seen, which is a gifted athlete who trains superbly and then races like a stranger. But I should be straight about what it is. It is a way of seeing, not a measured law. Nobody has fitted a formula to it, and I would not trust anyone who claims to have. Opponents, equipment, injury, conditions and plain chance affect a result too, and the picture leaves them out. What it does is move one question. Part of the gap between what you can do and what you do may be a problem of state, and not only of talent.
I was fortunate to have a body that rarely made this a crisis. Racing has never been a place of much anxiety for me. In 1990 our four, a crew of novices entered in the varsity event, finished third in the country, and later that month we were beaten by the best rowers in the nation, many of them on their way to the Olympics. I remember both as a privilege. Neither felt like a verdict. I have often wondered whether that calm was temperament or simply a thousand repetitions. I suspect mostly the second, which is the good news, because repetition can be arranged.
§ 2 · The window
The oldest picture of state and performance is an arch. In 1908 Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, working with mice given a mild shock while learning to tell two boxes apart, found that performance rose with arousal, peaked, and then fell, and that the peak came earlier when the task was harder. The curve has been drawn on whiteboards ever since: too little arousal and you are flat, too much and you tip over, and in between there is a window.
I use the picture and I do not lean on it. The original work was on mice, and the human evidence is messier than the whiteboard version suggests. Arousal is not one thing, and performance is not one thing either. But two parts of the arch survive scrutiny well enough to build on. First, the window moves with the task. The finer the skill, a putt, a surgeon's hands, a decision, the less arousal you want. Explosive, simple work, a sprint, tolerates and even wants more. Second, when the pressure is high enough that heart rate climbs and attention narrows to a tunnel, the part of the brain that holds working memory and fine judgment loses some of its grip. Emotional regulation is, quite literally, the skill of finding your window and staying in it.
§ 3 · Why the gifted choke
Choking is what can happen when a capable performer goes over the top of the arch, and researchers have proposed two explanations for it, which may operate separately or together.
One is distraction. Worry eats working memory. Part of you is now monitoring the score, the crowd and the consequences, which leaves less of you to do the task. The other is explicit monitoring. You start thinking about the swing, the stroke or the step you have done ten thousand times, and the conscious mind steps in to supervise a movement that ran better on its own. Roy Baumeister argued for the second explanation in 1984, in a paper on why incentives sometimes make people worse, and Sian Beilock spent a career testing both. Some studies find changes in motor and frontal activity around a choke. It is the mirror image of flow, where the self-monitoring goes quiet and the body does what it knows.
That resembles what I notice in my left hand, though resemblance does not establish the same mechanism. I did not need a laboratory to notice it. I needed a boat at five in the morning and a body that seemed to tell me, every time, the moment I started watching it.
The theory comes with a caution, because it is easy to oversell. These effects are real but they are not absolute, and they vary by person and by skill. Experts sometimes do benefit from attending to a movement, and beginners often need to. The rule is that a well-learned skill is easily disrupted by too much conscious control, not that thinking is always the enemy.
§ 4 · Your window, and the way back into it
The sport psychologist Yuri Hanin spent years with elite athletes and found that the window is not the same for everyone. Each performer has a personal zone. Some do their best a little fired up and some nearly serene. His framework, the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning, has more support as a description of individual differences than as a precise predictor, but it points at something I have watched in crews for years. The edge goes to the athletes who know where their own zone is and can steer back into it.
Two things make regulation possible. The first is knowing where you are, reading your own arousal honestly, in the moment, before it runs away. The second is having a way back. Reappraisal is the quickest. In a set of studies Alison Wood Brooks asked people to say, out loud, that they were excited and not anxious before a performance, and they tended to perform better than people who tried to calm down. The same surge, a pounding heart and a tight breath, can be read as dread or as readiness. These studies were small and brief, and I would not claim the reframe works for everyone, but it fits what many athletes report and it costs nothing to try.
There are other levers. A long, slow exhale pulls arousal down within a breath or two. Recovery resets the baseline you start from. Attention trained on the task and not the threat keeps working memory where it belongs. James Gross's model of emotion regulation is helpful here because it makes a distinction I wish I had known at twenty: changing how you read a feeling early is generally cheaper than suppressing its expression late. Stack those habits, and regulation stops being a trait you were or weren't born with. It becomes a skill.
§ 5 · Everywhere it counts
None of this belongs only to sport. The same layer sits under a surgeon's hands, a pilot's emergency checklist, a musician before a recital, a founder in a raise and a speaker at the lectern. The stakes change and the skill changes, and the question underneath stays the same: does my state let my training come out?
At twenty-five I took the sixty-dollar-an-hour work over a job with a future at twelve, because I needed to survive more than I needed to plan. Research on scarcity, from Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, argues that having too little narrows the horizon in just this way. That work is contested, and I would not hang a theory on it. It is a pattern I recognize and not a cause I can prove.
§ 6 · The half of training that is left to chance
Here is the strange asymmetry. Physical training is often more systematic than the way we prepare for pressure. Strength, conditioning, skill, nutrition and recovery are measured and progressed, and the regulation layer is often left more to chance, even though coaches and sport psychologists do real work on it. Composure is still sometimes treated as a fixed trait you either have or don't.
I do not think that is true, and I do not think it is quite false either. Some of us are more reactive than others, and I would be misleading you if I said temperament did not matter. But the part that can be trained is larger than the part we leave to luck. One reason is simple. You cannot easily progress what you cannot see, and for a long time the regulation layer was hard to see, so it stayed a vague idea called mental toughness.
It was the question of how to make it visible that led me to build SportsFlow. A founder's story is not evidence, so I'll say plainly where this stands. The tool I built to track arousal regulation, which I call the ARI-32, is a proposal for turning "how settled am I right now?" into a number with a trend. It needs testing in independent samples before anyone should rely on it. The idea is simple: measure, watch for drift out of your window, try a lever such as breath or reappraisal or recovery, and measure again. Whether that loop helps most people is a question I would like answered honestly.
§ 7 · Where this leaves me
Talent raises the ceiling, and state may help decide how close you get. I believe that, with the caveats above.
The line I keep returning to is one I hold as a working principle, not a promise: the state cannot be ordered, but the conditions can be prepared. You cannot command calm on the morning of a race. You can sleep, eat, warm up, rehearse the thing a thousand times, know your own window, and carry a few ways back. Most of what I mean by training the mind is that, and it is mostly dull. On the mornings it works, I stop thinking about my left hand, and it does what it knows.
Sources and further reading
Yerkes, R. M. & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18. Origin of the arousal-performance arch, in mice.
Baumeister, R. F. (1984). Choking under pressure: self-consciousness and paradoxical effects of incentives on skillful performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46.
Beilock, S. (2010). Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. Explicit-monitoring and distraction accounts.
Hanin, Y. L. (2000). Emotions in Sport. Human Kinetics. Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning.
Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143. Small, brief studies.
Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2. The process model.
Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity. Times Books. Contested.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow. Flow as peak performance with self-monitoring quieted.