Mindset Training

Message from the Founder

Growing up, sport was my entire focus, and no matter the season I was always training for something. During baseball season every free moment I had was spent in the batting cages or taking infield practice, over and over again, and the next day I’d go back wanting to build on whatever I had figured out the day before. When the season ended I moved straight to skateboarding and snowboarding and spent the off-season chasing my next trick. Baseball and board sports were my whole identity, and I competed in both at a high level growing up. I didn’t really understand at the time what it was about sport that pulled me in so hard. I just knew the practice had a purpose, and the purpose was showing up better at the next game or the next competition.

That structure went away in my twenties, the way it does for most of us once organized sports end. There was no coach anymore and no season to get ready for. What surprised me was that the pull didn’t go anywhere. I found lifting and training and felt the same draw toward progress, practice, nutrition, sleep and recovery, and for a while I treated it the way I had always treated sport, as preparation for something.

“There was no coach anymore and no
season to get ready for.”

Jay B.

A couple of years in, I realized the reason had changed underneath me. The routine used to be set by a coach or a season, and somewhere along the way it had turned into a ritual. The rhythm of the week, whether it was an upper/lower split or endurance work, the timing of each workout and the timing of my meals, none of it was building toward a game anymore. It had become part of my life and part of who I am, the same way my morning coffee and my meditation at night are. Nobody puts those on a calendar. They’re just how my days go.

That doesn’t mean the training lost its purpose. There’s no game day on the calendar, but every session is still training for something, even if it’s just the next one, to be a little stronger and a little more precise than the last one. Training for something specific like Hyrox or a marathon will always have an allure for the competitor in me. But training became much bigger than that, and at this point I can’t imagine a stretch of my life without some kind of training ritual that has nothing to do with competing.

I think the shift from routine to ritual happens when we start to notice what training is doing for us outside the gym, in our mindset and our confidence, and sometimes even in how clearly we think. Once it has that kind of impact on the rest of our lives, it stops being a routine. Most people who come to training after sports hit this switch at some point. Some of us notice it when it happens and some of us never do. Either way, a ritual is something personal, something you keep doing whether anyone is watching and whether or not there’s a game around the corner.

– Jay B.

Home of Champions

Anson Dorrance, who coached Mia Hamm at North Carolina, once saw her alone in a park the summer before her senior season, running sprints with nobody around. Afterward he wrote her a note:

There was no game that day and nobody in that park to impress. She was out there anyway, because by then the reason for being out there belonged to her.

From the outside, a routine and a ritual can look exactly the same. A routine runs on structure that lives outside of us, a goal date or somebody counting on us to show up, and when that structure disappears the routine usually goes with it, one skipped morning at a time. A ritual has the reason built in, so it outlasts the race and even the activity itself. Size one year, endurance a few years later, it carries straight through. The early mornings in the batting cage turn into early morning runs or lifts, and the part that gets us out of bed hasn’t changed at all.

You can usually tell which one you’re running on by the question that shows up before training. A routine asks whether we have to go today, and once that question is on the table, we’re already negotiating with ourselves. With a ritual, the question mostly stops coming up.

That’s where the separation happens. Game day motivates everyone. The gap gets built on a Tuesday in February, when there’s no particular reason to push and nobody would know the difference, and someone running on ritual doesn’t have to go looking for a reason to show up that day. They walked in with theirs.

Neuroscience Highlight

Rewards can wear down the drive they’re supposed to build.

Fifty years of research points to something a little uncomfortable, and it starts with a group of preschoolers. In a 1973 study, kids who already loved to draw were promised a “Good Player” award for drawing. Later, during free play, they drew less than kids who had never been promised anything. Kids who received the same award as a surprise kept drawing just as much, which means the damage came from expecting the award going in.

In 2010, neuroscientists saw the same pattern inside the brain. People played a simple timing game in an fMRI scanner, some paid for performance and some not. Once the payments stopped, the paid group chose to play less on their own time, and activity dropped in the anterior striatum and prefrontal cortex, areas tied to motivation and to how much we value what we’re doing.

When the reason we train lives outside of us, in a race or a post, the brain starts valuing the session for that reason, and the motivation leaves when the reason does. A ritual’s reason was never outside to begin with, which may be why a major review of ritual research concluded that rituals help regulate emotion and performance.

In the Research

Ritual gets built by coming back

In a University College London study, about a hundred people tracked how long a new daily behavior took to feel automatic. The average was around 66 days, anywhere from 18 to more than 250, and missing a single day didn’t set anyone back. Doing the same thing in the same setting is what built it.

The steps don’t need a practical reason

Ritual researchers point to a fixed sequence, repeated the same way every time, as a defining feature, and the steps often have no practical purpose. The same warm-up order or the same song before the first set won’t make anyone stronger. The consistency gives the brain a predictable start and takes “do I feel like it?” off the table.

The training that builds champions rarely happens in front of anyone. A routine can carry us through a season or two, and what keeps us coming back for decades is whatever we bring through the door on the mornings nobody will ever hear about.