Your Brain Needs a Warm-Up Too

Troy Brosnan with his signature pre-race pose.

Troy Brosnan stretches his arms above his head, fingers reaching skyward, and holds the position, the start gate is seconds away and thousands of people are watching. The track drops off a cliff edge into a minute and a half of the most technically demanding terrain on the planet; Brosnan looks, for a moment, like someone waking up from a nap.

Most riders assume the answer is simple. Get amped. Get fired up. Send it. But the science of pre-performance preparation tells a more nuanced story, and it is one that matters whether you are dropping into a World Cup final or rolling up to a trail feature that has been giving you trouble all season.

The Right State, Not the Highest State

Over a century ago, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson discovered something that coaches and athletes are still learning to apply. Performance does not keep improving as arousal increases. It follows a curve - too little activation and you are flat, unfocused, sluggish. Too much and you are tight, reactive, tunnel-visioned.

Somewhere in the middle is where the best performance lives.

This is the Inverted-U hypothesis, and its practical implication is straightforward but often ignored: the goal before a ride is not to get as hyped as possible, but to find the right level of activation for the task ahead.

Sport psychologist Yuri Hanin, working out of the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, took this further with his Individualized Zones of Optimal Functioning framework. Hanin's research showed that different athletes perform best in different emotional states. Some riders genuinely need high arousal to compete at their best, while others need to be calm, almost meditative. And the same rider might need a different state for a steep, technical section than for a high-speed, open pedal track. What matters is not whether you are fired up or dialed back, but whether you are in your zone.

This is why Brosnan's quiet stretch and another rider's chest-thumping can both be exactly right - they are not doing the same thing, they are each navigating toward their own optimal state. The ritual is the vehicle, not the destination.

What the Research Actually Shows

The idea that mental warm-ups improve performance is not just coaching intuition. A 2021 meta-analysis from the University of Vienna, led by Rupprecht, Tran, and Gröpel, examined 112 effect sizes across 15 different sports and roughly 800 athletes. The findings were clear: athletes who used pre-performance routines consistently outperformed those who did not, in both low-pressure and high-pressure conditions. The effect held regardless of age, gender, or skill level.

What made the routines effective was not their complexity. Simple routines worked as well as elaborate multi-step sequences and consistency and personal meaning were the common threads.

Separate research on self-talk, led by Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis and his team at the University of Thessaly, showed that the type of internal dialogue matters. Instructional self-talk ("soft hands," "look through the turn") is more effective for technical, fine-motor tasks. Motivational self-talk ("let's go," "commit") is better for strength and effort-based performance. Their meta-analysis of 32 studies found a moderate but reliable positive effect, with the strongest gains showing up in tasks that demand precision and coordination.

Then there is the neuroscience of visualization. Motor imagery research, including recent neuroimaging work published in PNAS, has confirmed what athletes have long felt intuitively: when you vividly imagine performing a skill, you activate the same neural pathways, including the supplementary motor area, primary motor cortex, and cerebellum, that fire during the real movement. Kinesthetic imagery, where you feel yourself performing the movement rather than watching it from the outside, produces the strongest activation of the motor system.

This is why visualization is not just a feel-good exercise, it is neural rehearsal. By the time a rider drops into a run they have mentally ridden three times, their brain has already laid down some of the neural groundwork for execution.

State-Dependent Learning and the Power of Matching

There is a concept in cognitive science called state-dependent learning, and it helps explain why routines are so powerful. The core idea is that skills are retrieved most effectively when the mental and physiological state during performance matches the state during training.

If you consistently train while calm and focused, your brain encodes those skills alongside that internal state. Recreating that state, through breathing, visualization, or a repeated sequence of actions, gives your brain the retrieval cue it needs to access what you have practiced.

This is what Kyle Strait was doing when he spent the entire month before Red Bull Rampage riding only his Rampage bike. By the time he dropped in for his finals run, his brain and body had been living in that state for weeks. The familiarity was not just physical. It was neurological.

Pre-run rituals work the same way on a smaller scale. A rider who breathes the same way, says the same phrase, and checks the same three things before every run is not being superstitious. They are building a bridge between how they prepared and how they need to perform.

How It Shows Up Across Sport

This is not an MTB-specific phenomenon and, the same principles drive pre-performance routines in nearly every sport where the athlete has a moment to prepare before execution.

Rafael Nadal's pre-serve ritual is one of the most documented in tennis. He adjusts his shorts, touches his face, places his hair behind each ear, and bounces the ball the same number of times before every serve. Nadal has said this is not superstition, it’s a way of ordering his environment to match the order he needs in his head.

In golf, Tiger Woods has described how putting on his glove acts as a psychological trigger that shifts him into a performance state, a mental bubble of complete focus. Rory McIlroy visualizes each shot with enough detail that he sees the trajectory, the apex, and the landing spot before he begins his swing. After a devastating final-round collapse at the 2011 Masters, McIlroy has spoken about learning that a consistent physical routine alone was not enough - he needed to match it with a consistent mental routine.

Lewis Hamilton, seven-time Formula 1 world champion, spends roughly 20 minutes before every race in quiet mental preparation. He slows his heart rate, focuses on being present, and goes through the same process whether he is starting from pole position or mid-grid. He has admitted that he still gets nervous before every start, but the routine gives him a container for that energy.

Simone Biles, arguably the greatest gymnast in history, mentally rehearses every skill in her routine before she salutes the judges. She watches video of her own best performances to reinforce positive mental imagery. When she feels scared, she counts to three and commits. The visualization is not optional. It is how she bridges the gap between training and execution under pressure.

Jonny Wilkinson, the England rugby fly-half whose drop goal won the 2003 World Cup, used a 20-minute mental rehearsal recording before every match. He described it as a "clarified daydream," layered with sensory details from past matches to make it feel real. His kicking stance, the toe-tap, the bent legs, the cupped hands, was a visible physical ritual that marked the transition from thinking to executing.

What connects all of these athletes is not the specific ritual, rather, it is the function of each ritual. Each one has found a repeatable way to arrive at their individual zone of optimal functioning before the moment of performance. The ritual gets them there; consistency keeps them there.

What This Means on the Trail

Young riders are increasingly being taught breathing and visualization techniques as part of their development. Instead of charging into a run overwhelmed by adrenaline, they learn to pause, breathe, and mentally rehearse. The difference is visible in that riders who do this look calmer, more deliberate, and more committed to their line choices.

For coaches, this is one of the highest-value things you can teach, not a specific ritual, but the concept that mental preparation is trainable. Help riders identify what their optimal state feels like. Help them experiment with breathing patterns, self-talk cues, and visualization approaches. Then help them build a short, repeatable sequence they can own.

The most effective routines are personal, simple, and they are practiced, not just deployed on race day.

Landing It

You would never send a rider down a track without warming up their body. The brain deserves the same treatment.

The science is clear: pre-performance routines improve focus, lower anxiety, and help athletes access the mental state where their best riding lives. Not the most excited state or the calmest state - Their - state.

Troy Brosnan stretches his arms to the sky and finds stillness in front of thousands. The next rider slaps his chest and finds fire. Both are ready.

How do you get into the right mindset?

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SourceS we used in this article

Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law

Hanin, Y. L. Individualized Zones of Optimal Functioning (IZOF) Model. https://academy.sportlyzer.com/wiki/arousal-and-performance/individual-zones-of-optimal-functioning-izof/

Rupprecht, A. G. O., Tran, U. S., & Gröpel, P. (2021). The Effectiveness of Pre-Performance Routines in Sports: A Meta-Analysis. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. https://medienportal.univie.ac.at/media/aktuelle-pressemeldungen/detailansicht/artikel/athletes-with-a-pre-performance-routine-perform-better/

Hatzigeorgiadis, A., Zourbanos, N., Galanis, E., & Theodorakis, Y. (2011). Self-Talk and Sports Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(4), 348-356. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26167788/

Neural Priming and Motor Imagery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515027122