Keeping Your Helmet On

Keeping Your Helmet On
By Anthony Lanzillo

When a football player walks onto the field for a game, the player wants to make sure that he is wearing his helmet and that it stays on. If the player keeps his helmet on, he will play better, enjoy playing with his team, and hopefully keep himself from getting hurt or injured. Playing with his helmet is simply being smart.

Just like keeping that helmet on his head, the football player needs to keep his head in the game. And the best way to do this is for him to be mentally prepared to play and perform when he shows up for that game. One mental skills tool that he should develop, practice and use during the season is The Mental Prep Playbook. This tool takes the traditional playbook to the next level.

The Mental Prep Playbook provides football players with a structured process to visualize and mentally rehearse the diagrammed plays in the team's playbook. What the player will do is select a specific play, take a piece of paper, and then identify and write down the five key steps to effectively visualize that play. Here are those five steps:

1. Identify your position on the field for the beginning of the play.

2. Identify your primary role and responsibility for that play.

3. Identify a personal strength of yours that will help you in this play.

4. Identify the performance objectives (physical moves) for the play.

5. Identify a positive feeling from a successful performance in this play.

So, when you are at a team practice, you can mentally take yourself through these five steps when the team is running through these plays or scrimmaging. Also, you will want to practice visualizing and mentally rehearsing these plays on your personal time.

Then, when you find yourself in the actual game and your team has called a play, you can immediately and quickly review five verbal and visual cues within a matter of several seconds. By doing this, you will "streamline" and focus your thoughts on what you are doing, and not get distracted by any negative feelings or worrying about things that you don't control.

Those five cues are - position, role, strength, first move and positive feeling.

One of the best tools for any football player is The Mental Tune-Up. For more information, go to http://fitnessgenerator.com/page.asp?id=3085&uname=ussportsradio.

Anthony is a mental skills coach to athletes. If you have any questions or want to talk to Anthony about being your mental skills coach, email him at risson1954@gmail.com.