Fine Tune Day: Putting It Together

After a long day of watching film and reviewing the past week’s game, and two hard days of practice. Thursday’s are a chance to recover physically and increase the level of mental focus in preparation for ‘Game Day’. Understanding the ‘Game Plan’ and what you are going to do on Saturday is important. On Thursdays, a football team will run through schemes and situations which might occur during the game on Saturday and how the team or player could respond to those situations.

Being prepared for possible scenarios and knowing how to respond to situations in a game can be important to success. That preparation comes from evaluation and hard work in the ‘early’ part of the week, but it must be followed by a focused mental time of going through scenarios and reviewing what can be done to have an opportunity to be successful.

If you are preparing for a game, a presentation, an event, etc. have you prepared the possible scenarios and how you might respond to them if they should occur? If the party you are planning is not going well, what’s your back-up plan? If the presentation takes a turn for the worse, what is a tool you can use to get the presentation back on track?

Have a specific strategy and focusing mentally and preparing for that situation can give you a better chance at handling the unexpected if it should arise. We were taught to go through ‘positive visualization’ of multiple situations that could arrive in a game and how we might respond and to ‘see’ ourselves in our mind, making the right choice and having success. This positive visualization was crucial in my success as an athlete and helped to mentally prepare me for situations that could occur in a game. As a quarterback, so many decisions you make are mental ones that then lead to physical actions, and training the mind to anticipate exceptions and then quickly and accurately respond to them was instrumental in success as an athlete.

Prepare for multiple scenarios in your game and visualize yourself making the right choices and coming out on top.