How Can an Athlete Manage Stress Before a Competition?
It's the drive to the game. Your athlete has gone quiet in the back seat, or won't stop talking, or keeps asking to stop for the bathroom. The heart rate is up, the stomach is tight, and you can see them reading all of that as a problem — as proof that something is wrong, that they're not ready.
Here's what most athletes never get told: that racing, jangling feeling isn't a malfunction. It's the body doing exactly what it's supposed to do before something that matters. The athletes who perform well under pressure aren't the ones who feel it less. They're the ones who learned to read the same signal differently.
How can an athlete manage stress before a competition?
Not by eliminating the nerves, but by regulating their energy and reframing what the nerves mean. The body's pre-competition response — racing heart, tight stomach, buzzing energy — is fuel, not a flaw. An athlete manages it three ways: reframing the sensations as readiness rather than threat, using the breath to bring over-activation into their optimal zone, and arriving with a routine that lands them in the right state on purpose. The goal is the right energy, not no energy.
This matters because the instinct — the athlete's and often the adult's — is to try to make the nerves go away. That's the wrong target. Nerves are a normal and even helpful part of performing, if an athlete learns to think about them correctly.
The athlete who fights their arousal spends energy before the competition even starts. The athlete who regulates it arrives with that energy intact and pointed in the right direction.
Why does telling an athlete to "calm down" not work?
Because calm usually isn't the goal, and chasing it can drain the energy the athlete needs. Most pre-competition stress is over-arousal — the energy has spiked past the point where it helps. But the answer isn't to crash it all the way down. It's to bring it into the athlete's optimal zone, which for many sports is still highly activated. Telling a keyed-up athlete to relax can push them below the energy they need to compete.
There's a deeper reason, too. You can't simply order your physiology to change — thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations are influenced by all kinds of things outside direct control. Trying to force them away tends to backfire.
What works isn't controlling the feeling but changing the relationship to it. As the framing goes, it's not the thought that counts — it's how you relate to the thought that makes the difference. An athlete who stops fighting the nerves and starts using them is doing something far more effective than calming down.
What's the single most useful reframe for pre-game nerves?
That the nerves are a sign of readiness, not danger. The physiological signature of anxiety and excitement is nearly identical — racing heart, sharpened senses, energy. The difference is the label the athlete puts on it, and the label changes how the body responds. Call it anxiety and the goal becomes getting rid of it; call it excitement or determination and the goal becomes using it.
Dr. Auerbach teaches athletes four specific ways to recategorize the feeling. First: this is a sign you care — nobody gets activated about something that doesn't matter to them. Second: this is my body getting ready — the stress response is literally the brain preparing to spend energy on something effortful, which is a sign things are working right, not wrong.
Third: this is excitement — physiologically the same state, but a far more useful frame. Fourth: this is determination — in studies where students reframed test anxiety as determination, they performed significantly better than those who tried to suppress the nerves. The reframe is a single sentence, and it's the most portable stress tool an athlete has.
How does breathing help an athlete manage stress?
It gives them direct, physical control over their arousal — a shortcut to the internal state. The mind and body are tightly linked, and the breath is one of the few automatic systems an athlete can consciously steer. Controlled, patterned breathing — like box breathing or equal-count breathing, where the inhale and exhale stay the same steady length — helps an athlete re-center and bring over-activation down into a usable range.
The research backs this up: a regular breathwork practice measurably improves a person's control over their arousal. It's not a one-time trick but a trainable skill that gets more reliable with practice.
This is usually the first concrete tool worth teaching, for three reasons. It's an action the athlete can actually take in the moment, rather than a vague instruction to relax. It builds confidence, because it works and they can feel it working. And it hands them control over one of the things most likely to derail a big performance. A breath is something an athlete always has with them.
What does it mean to regulate energy rather than control it?
Regulation means matching your internal state to what the performance demands — not forcing your body to feel a certain way. Different performances need different energy. A calm, deliberate state suits one task; an explosive, amped state suits another. Regulation is the skill of getting your thinking, feeling, and physiology to the level the moment calls for, then sustaining it.
The key distinction is that regulation is not the same as control. An athlete can't simply switch off a racing heart by deciding to. What they can do is change their relationship to it — for instance, by relabeling the racing heart as "a sign I care" instead of "something's wrong." That shift is available even when direct control isn't.
In practice, an athlete is working three dials: thinking (the thoughts and self-talk), feeling (the emotional state), and physiology (the body's arousal). Skilled performers learn which dial to turn to get into their zone — sometimes reframing a thought, sometimes using the breath, sometimes a motivational cue like a team's "let's go" to bring energy up. The aim is always the same: the right state for this performance.
Is stress actually bad for young athletes?
Short bursts of performance stress paired with recovery aren't harmful — they're how athletes build capacity. We've been taught that all stress is bad and should be minimized, but the stress response itself is just the body preparing to do something effortful, and that can be genuinely helpful. The problem isn't stress; it's stress without rest.
When stress is experienced for long stretches with no recovery, it does become harmful. But when stress is paired with rest, it builds what's called adaptive capacity — the ability to take on progressively harder challenges. Like a muscle, the cycle of stress and recovery is what produces growth.
For a young athlete, this reframes the pre-competition nerves entirely. The activation before a game isn't damaging them; it's part of the work, as long as the schedule and the environment also build in real recovery. The thing to watch isn't whether an athlete feels stress before competing — that's normal and useful — but whether they're getting the rest that turns that stress into growth rather than depletion. Persistent, unrelieved stress is a separate concern that deserves real attention.
How can a coach help a whole team handle pre-competition stress?
Teach the reframe and the breath as normal team skills, and use practice to rehearse pressure rather than avoid it. The most scalable move is making "nerves are readiness" the shared language of the group — so when an athlete feels their heart pounding before a game, the team's default reading is "I'm ready," not "I'm scared." Pair that with a simple breathing routine the whole team can run, and every athlete has two tools that work in the moment.
The second layer is pressure training: strategically introducing pressure in practice so athletes get reps at managing it before it counts. This works like exposure — the more an athlete engages with a challenging situation in a controlled setting, the better they cope with it later. The important nuance is that pressure isn't the same as difficulty. Making a drill physically harder raises difficulty; raising the importance of the outcome — a consequence for the last rep, eyes watching — is what raises pressure.
Because over-arousal looks different in every athlete, a baseline read helps you see who runs hot under stress and who needs activating. The Readiness Map assesses athletes across seven mental skills — including stress management and performing under pressure — so you can coach the right regulation for each athlete rather than one generic message for all.
Can stress management be trained, or is it a personality trait?
It's a trainable set of skills, not a fixed trait. The reframe, the breathwork, knowing your optimal zone, learning which dial to turn — each is a competency built through deliberate practice, the same way a physical skill is. Athletes who stay composed under pressure usually got that way by training these tools, not by being born unflappable.
This is why "some kids just handle pressure better" is a misleading story. It treats a trained outcome as a personality, and it leaves the athletes who struggle with nothing to work on. The athlete who melts down before competition isn't missing a temperament — they're missing tools nobody taught them.
For an individual athlete, the starting point is understanding their own stress pattern: where their optimal zone sits, what tips them past it, and which reframes actually land for them. A psychological portrait like First Read makes those patterns visible, so the regulation work has a target instead of a guess.
Key takeaways
Managing pre-competition stress isn't about eliminating nerves — it's about regulating energy and reframing what the nerves mean. The racing heart and tight stomach are the body preparing for effort, not a malfunction. The athletes who perform well aren't calmer; they read the same signal differently.
"Calm down" is usually the wrong instruction. Most pre-game stress is over-arousal, and the goal is the athlete's optimal zone — often still highly activated — not calm. And since you can't force physiology to change on command, the move is changing your relationship to it: relabeling nerves as a sign you care, your body getting ready, excitement, or determination.
The practical toolkit is a reframe (a single sentence that recategorizes the feeling), the breath (box or equal-count breathing for direct control over arousal), and a routine that lands the athlete in the right state on purpose. Stress paired with rest builds capacity; stress without recovery is the actual risk.
Coaches scale this by making the reframe and the breath shared team skills and by using pressure training — strategically rehearsing pressure in practice, remembering that importance, not difficulty, is what creates it.
Ready to build stress management into your athletes?
The athletes who handle pressure aren't born calm — they've trained the tools to read and regulate their own energy. Mettle turns Dr. Alex Auerbach's sport psychology into tools coaches can use, starting with a clear read on who runs hot and who needs activating.
Readiness Map: A seven-scale read on each athlete's mental skills — including stress management and performing under pressure — so you can see who's most likely to over-arouse before a game. First assessment free to try.
Team Assessment: Individual reads aggregated into a team-level picture of strengths and gaps, with practical recommendations for where to focus.
Ready in 20: Targeted state-shift sessions built around specific mental challenges — including reframing nerves as readiness and building a regulation routine. Grounded in single-session intervention research. (Coming Spring 2026.)
When a pattern runs deep or persists, Mettle connects you with the sport psychology professionals behind the frameworks for 1:1 or team support.
Start with the Readiness Map · See the Team Assessment
About the Expert: Dr. Alex Auerbach, Ph.D., CMPC, is a performance psychologist with the Jacksonville Jaguars and co-founder of Mettle and Momentum Labs. The author of Called to Greatness (2024), he has worked with athletes and leaders across the NBA, NFL, MLB, college athletics, and elite performance environments. His evidence-based approaches to mental performance are systematized through Mettle's platform, making expert mental training accessible to athletes and the coaches who develop them.
This article addresses normal performance-related stress and energy regulation. Persistent stress, anxiety, or distress that extends beyond competition is worth discussing with a qualified professional.