How elite athletes such as Rory McIlroy are learning to keep calm in clutch moments

Jackson retired as a professional rugby union player when he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2013. In the years that followed, he became a breathwork mentor to elite athletes. He has worked with a number of high-profile athletes, including the England women’s international soccer team, who in the past four years have won two European Championships, either side of reaching a World Cup final under manager Sarina Wiegman.

“Every single breath you take influences your heart rate,” Jackson, who has recently published a book called ‘Breathe Smarter, Run Stronger’, says. “On the inhale, your heart rate naturally speeds up, and on the exhale, it naturally slows down. So when you then understand how to use your breathing, you can manipulate your heart rate.

“Doing something as simple as trying to control and slow down your exhalation and your overall breathing cycle helps to calm your nervous system. Spending more time trying to gently elongate the exhale a little bit can bring your heart rate down.”

Jackson says one common mistake athletes can make is breathing too hard or taking in more air than is needed, particularly in sports such as golf, darts, and snooker, which are less cardiovascularly demanding.

“If we’re trying to calm ourselves down, we don’t always necessarily need more air. We just need to breathe in a mechanical way that’s calmer and slower,” he says.

“What we’re talking about is the relationship that breathing has with our nervous system and our stress response. And in this instance (when referring to McIlroy), that’s not related to a need for more oxygen, we just need a calmer breath. We want to send signals to the brain saying ‘we’re safe, everything is OK, let’s just perform the skill that we’ve practiced thousands of times.'”

Jackson says there are three key factors when it comes to perfecting the art of breathing in a high-pressure environment. “No 1 is being able to control your respiratory rate, that’s the kingpin, the key domino that is going to affect absolutely everything else.

“And then the other two things are linked. The second one being the rib cage and the alignment of it, because your rib cage houses your lungs, but the bottom of the rib cage houses your diaphragm, and that’s the third one, your diaphragm.

“You want to be able to activate your diaphragm. You want your inhalation to be drawn from your diaphragm because that’s going to draw air into the most efficient parts of your lungs.”

In terms of post-performance breathing, Jackson says those protocols can be important for athletes to practice to help bring calm and improve sleep quality.

According to Whoop, McIlroy had no problem with sleep over the Masters weekend. He averaged eight-and-a-half hours per night and had more than nine hours before the final day.

“That is within the target window of what I would recommend for elite athletes,” Cheri D. Mah, a sleep physician and performance specialist, says. “The national U.S. recommendation is for every adult to minimally get seven hours of sleep every night to prevent health risks and performance decrements, but that’s the lower threshold.

“If you told me he’s getting six hours every night, then I would say that short-term sleep loss definitely could have an impact on decision-making or reaction time and the ability to execute sport-specific skills.”

Mah has worked with a long list of elite talent in the United States and globally, including Olympians and basketball’s Golden State Warriors. She worked with the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles in the lead-up to their 2017 Super Bowl victory, and for the past three years, she has been working with the Seattle Seahawks, who won the Super Bowl in February.

“I’ve worked with them to develop a more comprehensive sleep program for the organization,” Mah says. “And part of that is travel and schedule. And then part of it is individual athletes because the rookie player has a very different lifestyle and habits than a veteran.

“When they go to the highest level, it’s really thrilling to see because it’s typically a whole year of investment around sleep. I tell them you can’t wait until the Super Bowl to care about sleep. It’s what you do every single day throughout the whole year that is going to add up and make a big difference, so that you have the ability to perform when it matters.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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