Terri Frost

Michael Phelps won 23 Olympic gold medals using a mental technique most athletes ignore: "The biggest thing that really separated me through my career was my mental game. Everything that was in between my ears." Michael explains how he used visualization: "When I would visualize, I'd visualize every single thing getting up to a meet, probably a month or so in advance. What could happen. What I want to happen. And what I don't want to happen. Because when it happened, I was prepared for it." He describes the goal: "When I got to a swim meet, there's nothing I can control at that point except what I do. I can't control what anybody else does. So I want to know how the race could go, how I don't want the race to go, and in a perfect world, how the race should go. So I could get behind the block and not have to think about anything." His coach Bob Bowman reveals how they trained this skill: "When Michael was young, I gave his mom a book of progressive relaxation. Before he'd go to bed at night, she would read this progression of things: clench your fists, work through your whole body. He got so good she'd just open the book, say two things, and he'd be asleep." Bowman explains why visualization works: "The brain cannot distinguish between something that's vividly visualized and something that's real. By the time Michael steps up on the block at the Olympics, he's swum that race hundreds of times in his mind. All he has to do is shut everything down and it goes on autopilot." Michael adds the key detail most miss: "When I would visualize, it would be what you want it to be, what you don't want it to be, what it could be. So you're always ready for anything. If I have a suit rip, fine, I need another suit, put it on. Any small thing that could go wrong, I'm ready for."

The Miracle on Ice 🇺🇸. The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team pulled off one of the greatest upsets in sports history. But inside the locker room? They had no clue how big it was. Here are 10 things you probably didn’t know about that game: [THREAD] 🧵