Why Do Elite Athletes Choke?

by Valerie Starratt, PhD

3 minutes

New study (read it here) uses wearable tech to see what brainwaves look like when athletes ‘choke’.

Spoiler: they look suspiciously like overthinking

Whether it’s a brief in-the-moment choke or a prolonged slump, it happens to even the best athletes.

A hard earned skill, mastered through years of dedication and practice, just disappears.

Why?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s because your brain is faster than you are and your insistence on being “in control” gets in its way.

But hang on, you say. How can my brain be faster than me if I AM my brain?

Completely reasonable question.

And the answer is: your brain is much more than the ‘you’ that you’re aware of.

The kicker here is that the part of your brain that you’re NOT aware of is the fast part. The part of your brain that you’re aware of and that you feel you have some level of control over? Waaaay slower. And, if we’re being honest, not very athletic. It is really good at problem solving, though! 

It’s that consciously aware, good at problem solving part of the brain that athletes use to develop those impressive skills in the first place. It can evaluate what the body is doing, compare that information to expert examples it examines, incorporate feedback it gets from outside mentors and coaches, and devise and implement strategies for closing the gap between its own movements and the movements it determines are most likely to lead to success. It is essentially a process of the conscious brain coaching its own body.

For the elite athlete, though, that level of skill-tweaking coaching does not happen in a moment of contest. It happens on the practice field, in the gym, and probably in the shower after a particularly maddening loss. 

It absolutely does not happen when the athlete is supposed to be performing the skills they have so diligently practiced. Or, at least, it shouldn’t happen then. When it does? Ta-da! Choke.

But how could the thing that makes an athlete so skilled to begin with be the same thing that causes them to be unable to perform that skill in the moment when it counts?

Let’s go back to the idea of the brain being the coach of its own body. That consciously aware, problem-solving brain has already done the work of evaluating and strategizing and tweaking during non-contest training moments. That’s how elite athletes get to be elite in the first place.

When that coach-brain tries to do its thing mid-game, though? It does nothing but get in the way.

Think about the last time you saw an elite athlete getting muscle-movement level instructions from their skills coach in the middle of a game. 

Just kidding. You can’t. Because it doesn’t happen. Coaches of elite athletes know that once the starting whistle blows, all technical coaching stops.

Why? Because the part of an athlete’s brain that actually controls those highly skilled movements is SO much faster than adjustments to those movements can be communicated… even if the call is coming from inside the house, as it were. 

This means that when the coach-brain tries to do what the skills coach knows not to do – communicate technical skills tweaks to an athlete who is actively in the process of doing what they have been trained to do – all it’s going to do is fuck shit up get in the way.

So what is an elite athlete to do if they want to avoid choking or falling into the dreaded slump?

Find a way to tell their brilliant, well-intentioned, problem-solving coach-brain to, very kindly, sit down and be quiet.