How to Get Into Flow State in Sports
You've felt it before: the shot goes up and you already know it's in before it drops, or the race feels slower and easier even though you're going faster than ever. That state is trainable. Here's the actual sequence to run before and during competition to make it show up more often.
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Steps to set up flow before you even start
Match the challenge to your current skill. Flow only shows up when what you're facing is hard enough to demand your attention but not so hard it tips you into panic. If a drill or opponent feels wildly out of your league, dial down the difficulty until it's tough but doable.
If it feels too easy, add a constraint (time limit, harder target, tighter footwork) to bring the challenge back up to meet you.
Pick one or two things you can control. Outcome goals ("win the race," "score a goal") pull your attention to something you can't directly manage in the moment. Process goals fix your attention on something you actually control right now.
Katie Ledecky's 1500m world record swim at the 2015 World Championships is a good example: afterward she described the race as feeling easy, and relaxed, which is the language of someone locked onto their own stroke and pace.
Build a short, repeatable pre-performance routine. This doesn't need to be elaborate. Mikaela Shiffrin has credited a pre-race visualization routine with helping her settle into the zone before she pushes off the start gate.
The routine itself matters less than the repetition: doing the same physical and mental sequence every time tells your body what's coming next and cuts down on the guesswork that creates nerves.
A few examples of what a routine can include:
- A fixed physical warm-up sequence, same order every time
- A specific breathing pattern (four seconds in, four seconds out) right before you start
- A short visualization of the first play or first few strokes, not the whole event
- A single cue word you say to yourself that means "go"
Jimmy Johnson, the Hall of Fame coach, brought the psychology of flow directly to his team ahead of Super Bowl XXVII in 1993, framing the game around getting locked into the moment rather than the pressure of the stakes. The Cowboys won that game decisively.
What flow feels like once you're in it
Flow feels calm and sharp at the same time. Time either speeds up or slows down depending on the sport, effort feels lower than it should for the pace you're actually hitting, and your attention narrows to the play in front of you instead of the crowd, the score, or what happens next.
Michael Jordan's stretch of seven three-pointers in a row during Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals is the clearest picture of this. By the seventh shot, he shrugged at the broadcast booth, visibly surprised by his own performance.
That shrug is what flow looks like from the outside: someone who's stopped narrating what they're doing and is just doing it.
Trying to force that feeling directly is what pushes it away. The moment you start thinking "am I in the zone right now," you've pulled your attention off the play and onto yourself, which is exactly the kind of self-watching that flow requires you to drop.
The part almost nobody tells you: what to do after a bad play
This is where most advice stalls out. Every list says "stay present" and "don't dwell on mistakes," but nobody says what to actually do with your body and mind in the ten seconds after a blown call, a missed shot, or a bad rep, while your heart rate is still up and your hands are still tight.
There's a concept called the Yerkes-Dodson law worth knowing here. It says performance gets better as your arousal (nerves, adrenaline, stress) rises, but only up to a point. Past that point, more arousal makes you worse.
Flow lives right at that peak: alert but not frantic. A bad play spikes your arousal past that point almost instantly, which is why you tense up and start overthinking. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it's built to do under a sudden jolt.
Trying to think your way calm while you're still in that spiked state doesn't work, because clear thinking requires the same nervous system that's currently occupied with the jolt. You need a way to bring the arousal back down first, before you ask yourself to think about anything.
Here's the move. The next time a bad call, missed shot, or ugly turnover happens mid-competition, do this before your next rep or point:
Picture the moment from outside your own eyes. For two seconds, see it like game footage: you, from the stands, or from a camera behind the play, watching it happen to a player on a screen.
Do one small physical reset at the same time. A breath out, a shoulder roll, a couple of bounces on the balls of your feet. Something short and physical that you can do in the tunnel, in the dugout, between points.
Move on to your next cue. Whatever your pre-play routine is (the breathing pattern, the cue word), run it again right here, the same way you did before the competition even started.
Watching the moment from outside yourself, for even a couple of seconds, puts a small gap between you and the jolt. That gap is what lets your arousal come back down out of the spike, so the next play starts from the calm-but-sharp zone instead of the tight, overthinking one.
Build a routine out of your own past flow moments
You've had flow before, even if you never called it that. Think back to a practice or game where things clicked, and write down what led into it: what the challenge felt like, what you were focused on, what your body was doing right before it started.
Look for the pattern across two or three of those moments. If you always felt it after a specific warm-up, a specific breathing pace, or a specific process goal, that's the raw material for your own pre-performance routine.
Try the pre-competition steps and the mid-play reset at your next practice or game. Notice what changes, and adjust the details until the routine feels like yours.
Ben is an ICF-certified coach and NLP master practitioner. He dives into psychology and neuroscience, then turns what he finds into tools athletes and high performers can use under pressure.
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