The Invisible Piece of the Performance Puzzle – Rob Copeland

July 31, 2018

We’ve all been there, sat at the top of a race run, going over it in our head, getting ourselves wound up, stressed, nervous, worrying about if we will be able to do ourselves justice or not in the upcoming run.

Even for the top riders, the psychological side of the sport can prove elusive and stop them from getting the results that they want, and may well be capable of. So how do we overcome this mental turmoil? What can we do to get in the right frame of mind and achieve that elusive ‘calm’ race run that Aaron Gwin often talks about?

Well, we tracked down Rob Copeland, the sports psychologist who helped Josh Bryceland get himself into a position to win the World Cup overall, and Steve Peat get that long-awaited World Championship win. In this podcast, Rob offers some great approaches that we can all take to help us manage our own minds in race conditions, but also in life in general, as well as talking about how he worked with Josh and Steve to help them unlock that performance puzzle. Give it a listen, and see what you can take away to help your own riding and racing.

You can subscribe to the podcast by visiting downtimepodcast.com/subscribe to make sure you get all our new episodes delivered straight to your device, or if you’re using iTunes, just click below…

While you are there, you can also join our mailing list to keep up to date on everything that’s going on with the podcast.

You can follow Rob on Twitter @drrobcopeland

You can find a directory of UK based sports and exercise psychologists at www.bps.org.uk

Rob mentioned a couple of books, they were…

Mental Toughness in Sport, Daniel Gucciardi & Sandy Gordon – on Amazon here

The Game Plan, Steve Bull – on Amazon here

Help us keep this podcast free by getting yourself a t-shirt from downtimepodcast.com/shop

If you want to share tips and advice with other podcast listeners on anything mountain bike related, you can join our Facebook group, head to www.facebook.com/groups/mtbperformance/ request permission to join the group and get involved!

You can check out our back catalogue of amazing episodes at downtimepodcast.com/episodes