The Mental Switch

By Matt Foreman

All great athletes have a mental switch, and it should be your goal to get one too.

Think of a light switch in your house. You flip it, and the lights turn on. Pretty simple, right?
Well, a mental switch is in your brain. When you flip it, your mind goes to a state of perfect
concentration, intensity, and confidence. The most experienced athletes usually have really
effective, powerful mental switches. They can make themselves internally sharp with a snap of
their fingers, just by recognizing that they’ve got a job to do and it’s time to get it on. They can
be having a conversation and maybe a few laughs, and in a matter of a few seconds they’re ready
to rock and roll. They recognize the task in front of them and apply the right level of inner
strength to it. Then, after they’ve taken care of business, they can flip the switch off and relax.

Like most things, this takes a long time to develop. I had a hard time with it when I was
young, I can tell you that. I used to be one of those guys who spent a couple of hours, or maybe
even the first half of the day, getting psyched up for a meet. My lifting was serious stuff, so I
thought I needed to do some kind of complete psychological transformation before I hit the
platform. I would go somewhere by myself, listen to some good heavy metal, and try to get as
jacked up as possible. I can’t say it worked that well. Instead of taking myself to weightlifting
nirvana, I just spent a lot of time getting really tense, nervous, and agitated. By the time I got to
the warm-up room, I was an irritable butthead that nobody liked. And if I lifted like crap in the
meet (which I often did), forget about it. I was ready to start punting baby kittens.

I figured out that I don’t perform well when I’m not happy. Do you ever find that? Over the
years, I’ve had a lot of people ask me if weightlifting is a way for me to release all my daily
frustration and anger. For some reason, people think lifting weights is like some kind of colon
flush for rage and hostility. It’s never been like that for me. First of all, I don’t walk around
boiling in anger all the time, so I don’t come to the gym with any fury that needs to be released.
Second, I’ve found that I always lift better when I’m in a good mood. So the psyching method I
used of going off by myself and working my brain into a cranked-up frazzle usually had the
opposite effect from what I was going for. Instead of taking me where I needed to be, it took me
farther away from it.

Maturity and experience took care of everything. As my career progressed, I just calmed
down and developed an ability to switch into the right mental state when I needed to. It’s a
weird combination of relaxation and intensity, which are two things that don’t seem to go
together when you first think about it. I don’t know if any of you follow boxing, but
welterweight world champion Manny Pacquiao is a pretty good example of this. I’ve seen this
guy walk to the ring for a title fight literally laughing and horsing around with the crowd. Keep
in mind, this is minutes before he steps into the ring to trade hands with another world-class
prizefighter who wants to pound his skull into garden mulch. He’s got a big smile on his face,
looking more like he’s at a birthday party than a fight. But then the bell rings, and he becomes a
punching turbine that destroys anybody they put in front of him. He’s probably got the best
mental switch in the world.
 Olympic champion Ilya Ilin is one of the weightlifting equivalents of this. I recently saw a
training video of Ilin where he worked up to a 192.5 kilo snatch in the gym. This is considerably
more than he snatched at the Olympics, but he was training over the 94-kilo bodyweight limit so
he was able to hit much bigger weights than he was planning for in competition when he had to
cut weight. Anyway, Ilin spent most of this workout smiling, dancing, and chatting with some of
the people around him as he progressed up set-by-set. There was one segment where he was
joking and giggling with somebody exactly twelve seconds before he snatched 160. This, my
friends, is a mental switch. The guy can just snap himself into combat mode at will, whenever
he wants to. Now, it’s obvious that Ilya Ilin is a different human being than almost anybody on
the planet, in many ways. His weightlifting ability transcends most of the people who have ever
picked up a barbell. But the point is that he has something we’re all trying to develop, and this
development should be top priority for any athlete.

When you get this mastered, your lifting career is going to get a lot easier. I’m not just
talking about meets, either. This is something you’ll be able to apply to daily training too. It’ll
make life fun because you can lift without anxiety and angst, and you’ll be able to perform
successfully when you need to. Your mentality will become, “I have a job to do and I know how
to do it, so let’s go to work.” And you’ll be able to summon this up whenever you want it.