Mental Training for Athletes, With Logan Christopher

Based on Episode 111 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and mental training expert Logan Christopher.

Nearly every coach will tell you sport is won in the mind, yet almost no one has an actual system for mental training for athletes. Logan Christopher built one out of necessity. A self-described “98-pound weakling” who fell in love with old-time strongman feats like bending nails and tearing phone books, he had no natural gifts to lean on, so he turned to the mind as his edge and spent a decade experimenting on himself and his clients. A certified hypnotist and NLP practitioner, he reduces the whole slippery subject to three trainable tools. In this episode he lays out what they are and, more usefully, exactly how to run them.

Key Takeaways

• Everyone says the mind is 90% of the game, then trains none of it. The value is in step-by-step methods, not the slogan.
• Three tools cover most of mental training: visualization, hypnosis, and anchors, and they stack together.
• Brighten the mental image and time it with the lift. Christopher says this simple hack added “neurological juice” and worked in roughly 80% of cases.
• Visualization is multisensory. Vision, sound, and the felt sense all matter, and shoring up your weakest channel often makes the biggest difference.
• Anchors are instant, unique state-triggers. A phrase like “I am on point” or a specific gesture can pull you back into flow on demand.

Why mental training gets praised but never practiced

Christopher’s starting point is that the field is full of agreement and empty of method. Athletes repeat that the game is mostly mental, but the sentiment stays hollow.

Everyone agrees with these sentiments, but they’re really hollow phrases. Very few people actually give you step-by-step methods, what you can do to change a belief or how specifically you should visualize. We all know visualization works, but how do you do it that actually makes it better?

Part of the resistance, he says, is that athletics is grounded in the physical while the mind is slippery and hard to grasp, and part is simple misconception. Say the word hypnosis and many people picture a stage act making someone cluck like a chicken, which shuts the door before any exploration begins. His whole project is to replace the vague reverence with procedures a coach or athlete can actually run.

The three tools of mental training

Christopher organizes mental training into three overlapping skill sets.

There are three main methods. These are visualization, so what we were just talking about. Then there’s hypnosis. And then there’s anchors. There’s other things, like beliefs or meta-programs, but those are the three main skill sets, and there is gonna be some blending between them.

The blending is the point. Hypnosis deepens the state so visualization lands harder; anchors get you into that state faster and can be set for later use. None of it requires much time either. A visualization can take three seconds, a hypnosis track ten to fifteen minutes, and an anchor, once built, fires instantly.

Visualization that actually works: brightness and the senses

The most immediately useful idea in the episode is a brightness hack Christopher stumbled onto while coaching a woman through a pike press she could not complete. She pictured the movement, but the image faded to black as she pushed up.

I thought, well, that’s easy. Let’s just reverse that. Have it get brighter as you push up. So she visualized that three times, then she busted out two or three reps. I explored this with other people, just simply brightening the movie, especially if you time it along with the lift. I’d say it works in like 80% of cases.

His theory is that brightening the mental picture adds “neurological juice,” more signal firing the muscles. The practical version is almost too simple: before a hard set, close your eyes, see yourself do it, brighten the image as you lift, and go. In one on-stage demonstration he walked a woman named Katie through the same kind of adjustment on the one-arm push-up.

I had her visualize the one-arm push-up using some of the aspects of the easy exercise, and just in doing this, spending a couple minutes, she was able to do seven one-arm push-ups. She went from two to seven, a massive PR in that moment.

He is careful not to promise miracles. A story that dramatic is rare, and the honest expectation is smaller.

If you do it right, you’ll always get some sort of increase. It may be much smaller, like a 5 or 10% increase, not a 350% increase, but it does enhance your ability in what you’re trying to do.

The bigger lesson is that visualization is not just pictures. Christopher insists it is multisensory: the visual image, the auditory channel (music, a coach’s voice, your own words), and the kinesthetic sense, which he splits into touch, balance, and internal feeling. Coaches can play with submodalities too, like whether you watch from inside your body or outside it, how close the image is, and even whether it is in two dimensions or three. His shortcut for a client who could not remember all of it was to just “see it in HD,” and he leans on a line often attributed to Einstein.

Our subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between something that is vividly imagined and something that’s real. So you’re imagining it in this way that is amped up, and that is why this kind of thing can actually change your physical results.

Because athletes tend to be strongly kinesthetic and visual, he adds one counterintuitive tip: deliberately train your weakest channel, usually auditory, since the thing holding you back is often the sense you never use.

Hypnosis, brain waves, and the flow state

Christopher treats hypnosis as a practical tool, not a parlor trick, and clears the biggest myth first.

There’s a myth that not everyone can be hypnotized, and that’s not true. Have you ever driven a car? There’s that road hypnosis. Or getting sucked into a good book. It’s really not all that different than sleep or meditation.

He maps it to brain waves: beta is normal waking, alpha is a light trance you slip into just by closing your eyes or zoning out on a drive, theta is a deeper creative state, and delta is sleep. The useful news for athletes is that you do not need to go deep.

For athleticism, if you can just get into alpha, that’s more than enough. We can actually do everything with visualization pretty well in just a beta brain wave state, but getting into that light trance with alpha is good.

When Joel asks whether alpha is essentially flow, Christopher agrees. For getting started he recommends pre-recorded tracks in the ten-to-fifteen-minute range, or learning self-hypnosis so you can shorten the induction with anchors and drop into a light trance between sets. He is clear that peak strength does not require dredging up childhood memories; bringing your awareness inward is enough to make the visualization land harder.

Anchors: changing your state on demand

The third tool is the one competitors can use in the middle of a match. An anchor is a deliberate trigger that flips your state instantly.

An anchor is a thing that changes your physiology, changes your state instantly. It can be a kinesthetic gesture, something you visualize, or a phrase you say to yourself. It has to be something specific that you’re really only accessing at those certain times.

Uniqueness is the one hard rule: pointing at someone cannot be an anchor because you point all the time, but a specific phrase or an odd gesture can be. Christopher uses “locked and loaded,” miming racking a shotgun, before a deadlift, and touches three fingers to his thumb to drop into a relaxed state. He notes that baseball players’ superstitions are really just anchors, and that state control is decisive in a strongman event, where you have to fire up for a one-minute effort and then shed it for an hour so you are not drained by the end. Built well, an anchor becomes a reset switch.

Flow state and the strategy of falling apart

The richest stretch of the episode comes when Christopher turns the tools on Joel, using his tennis matches against his brother as a live case. Joel plays freely at first, then unravels the moment his brother pulls ahead. Christopher walks him back through it and names the mechanism.

Once he surpasses you in points, you said specifically you have this feeling, a sinking feeling, and that feeling just starts the judgments going in your head. So this is your strategy for falling apart.

Joel describes the tipping point exactly: the fun, exploratory movement stops and the analysis starts. As he puts it, “as soon as that brain comes online, I’m gone.” That, Christopher explains, is a program running on autopilot, and it can be rewritten by catching it earlier and practicing a new response until it becomes the habit. The fix he demonstrates is an anchor built from a genuine flow memory, in Joel’s case the one open-court dunk he ever finished, paired with the phrase “I am on point.” The idea is to rehearse the trigger against a vivid past state so it is available the next time the match starts slipping.

Frequently asked questions

What is mental training for athletes?
In Christopher’s framing it is the deliberate, step-by-step practice of the mental side of performance, built mainly from three tools: visualization, hypnosis, and anchors. The emphasis is on repeatable methods rather than the vague reminder that sport is “mostly mental.”

How do you use visualization to get stronger?
Before a hard effort, close your eyes, picture yourself performing it from inside your body, and brighten the image as you move, ideally timing the brightening to the lift. Christopher found this simple adjustment improved performance in roughly 80% of the people he tried it with.

Does sports visualization really work?
Christopher argues it reliably produces some gain when done well, often modest (a 5 to 10% increase) rather than dramatic, because the subconscious responds to a vividly imagined rehearsal much as it does to the real thing. Working all the senses, not just the picture, makes it stronger.

Can hypnosis improve athletic performance?
He says yes, and that everyone can reach the light “alpha” trance it uses, which overlaps with flow. For sport you do not need a deep trance; a ten-to-fifteen-minute track or brief self-hypnosis between sets is enough to make visualization land harder.

What is an anchor and how do you set one?
An anchor is a unique trigger, a gesture, phrase, or image, that switches your state instantly. Build it by firing the trigger while you are genuinely in the target state (or vividly reliving a memory of it), repeating it until it reliably brings that state back on command.

About the authors

Logan Christopher is a mental training expert, strongman, and entrepreneur from Santa Cruz, California. He is the owner of Legendary Strength and CEO of Lost Empire Herbs, a certified hypnotist, and a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming who has spent years applying visualization, hypnosis, and anchoring to strength and performance.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach focused on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Logan Christopher on Just Fly Sports.