Experiencing Pressure: A Pressure Training Guide for Athletes

Pressure has a way of finding the gap in your game. You can execute a skill perfectly a hundred times in training, and then the one time it matters most, with the score close, the crowd watching, or a selector in the stands, something changes. Your body feels different. Your thoughts speed up or go quiet in the wrong way. This is not a flaw in your character. It is a predictable psychological and physiological response, and it can be trained.

This blog is about what pressure actually is, why training in comfortable conditions only gets you halfway there, and what the current research says about building your own capacity to perform when it counts.

What's Actually Happening When You Feel Pressure

Pressure is your nervous system responding to the weight of expectation of a situation where the outcome matters and the result feels uncertain. Heart rate rises, muscles tense, attention narrows, sometimes onto the threat (what if I mess this up?) rather than the task (what do I need to do right now?). This is a normal, adaptive response. The problem is not that you feel it. The problem is what your attention does with it.

Two things tend to happen under pressure that hurt performance. The first is where you start consciously monitoring a skill that is normally automatic, thinking about your technique instead of just doing it. The second is a shift in attention from the task itself toward the consequences of failing at it. Both pull focus away from the process that actually produces execution.

Why Comfortable Training Isn't Enough

Most training happens in low-stakes conditions: no crowd, no consequence, no selectors, nobody watching who matters. That builds skill, but it does not build the specific capacity to execute that skill while your nervous system is activated. If the first time you ever feel real pressure is in competition, your body is encountering something genuinely unfamiliar, and unfamiliarity itself adds to the threat response.

A 2025 scoping review of pressure-based training practices found that the most effective approaches deliberately manufacture pressure in training: adding real or simulated consequences, an audience, fatigue, or scoreboard stakes, so the physiological and attentional experience of pressure becomes familiar rather than novel (Kegelaers et al., 2025). The review identified two complementary goals behind this kind of training: developing genuine coping skills for pressure, and improving the transfer of technical skill from practice into competition conditions where it actually needs to show up.

This matters because familiarity changes how a stimulus is processed. A pressure situation you have felt before, and coped with before, registers as manageable rather than threatening. One you have never felt before registers as a bigger deal than it needs to be.

What the Research Says Helps

Alongside deliberately training under pressure, newer research has looked at how athletes interpret pressure moments after they happen, and it turns out that matters almost as much as the moment itself. A 2025 study on attribution training, teaching athletes to explain pressure-related mistakes in ways that are specific and changeable rather than global and permanent, found that this reframing reduced the likelihood of choking recurring in subsequent high-pressure moments (Hang et al., 2025). An athlete who thinks "my grip was off on that shot" recovers faster than one who thinks "I always fold under pressure." The first is a fixable detail. The second is an identity, and identities are much harder to shake off mid-competition.

Put together, these two strands of research point to a practical model: expose yourself to pressure deliberately and often, and manage how you talk to yourself about the moments that go wrong when you do.

How to Actually Train This

• Manufacture consequences in practice. Ask your coach to build genuine stakes into training drills, a scoreboard, a forfeit for the losing side, teammates watching a single attempt rather than ten. If your training never has anything riding on it, your body has no reason to activate the way it will in competition, which means competition will always feel qualitatively different from what you have practised.

• Rehearse the specific moment, not just the skill. If you know you will be taking a penalty, serving at match point, or stepping up in the final minute, rehearse the entire sequence, walking to the spot, the crowd noise, the wait, not just the physical action. The more of the real moment you can simulate, the less novel the actual moment will feel.

  • Visualisation. This could be a really good opportunity to practice visualisation of the specific moments, taking in all the sentences, creating a really vivid image in your mind of that moment to do some mental reps away from the field/court.

• Build a process cue you trust. One or two words or a physical anchor (a breath, a specific look at the target) that redirects your attention to the task rather than the outcome. Decide on this in training, not in the moment itself, and rehearse it under the pressure conditions you have built.

• Practise your affirmations, not just your skills. After a pressure moment goes badly, in training or competition, instead of getting into the nitty gritty of why and how, learning how to think flexibility can be valuable. This is a skill in itself and gets easier with repetition. Affirmations like "onto the next job", "review happens tomorrow", can be methods of parking what has happened and continuing on with the next job.

• Track your pressure reps like training load. Just as you'd log sets and sessions, notice how often you're genuinely training under simulated pressure versus comfortable conditions. If it's rare, that's the gap most worth closing before your next big competition.

A Different Way to Think About Pressure

The goal of this kind of training is not to make pressure disappear. Elite performers still feel it, often intensely. The goal is to make pressure familiar enough that your attention stays where it needs to be: on the process, not the threat. That is a trainable skill like any other, which means the athletes who feel most in control under pressure are usually not the ones who feel the least of it. They are the ones who have felt it the most, deliberately, in advance.

References

• Kegelaers, J., Wylleman, P., Bunigh, A., & Oudejans, R. R. D. (2025). Implementing pressure on athletes during training: A scoping review. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2025.2578781

• Masters, R. S. W., & Maxwell, J. P. (2008). The theory of reinvestment. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1(2), 160–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/17509840802287218

• Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336–353. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.336

• Huang, D., Wang, H., Tang, Y., Lei, H., and Koh, D. (2025). Enhancing athlete performance under pressure: The role of attribution training in mitigating choking. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1435374. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1435374

  
  

  This blog was drafted with assistance from Claude, an AI assistant. All content has been reviewed, edited, and approved by the author.