The Law Of Knowing Your Numbers

We’re back with a new law straight from Gary Mack’s book The Mind Gym. It aligns with everything we believe in as athletes—controlling your mind to win the game. We’ll be leaning on the next section of the book to define this law: Know Your Numbers. There’s a lot to get into!

"I had no chance of controlling a ball game until I first controlled myself.”—Carl Hubbell

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Learn about the benefit that Knowing Your Numbers can have on your performance.

Know Your Numbers

This concept is simple: every athlete (or person) has an optimal number on the performance curve corresponding to their peak performance. If your number is too low as you head into critical moments, you’ll underperform. If your number is too high, you’ll have the jitters and make mistakes.

The key to this concept is that everyone’s number is different and is affected by several factors, including:

🟠Temperament
🟠Length/time of event
🟠Nature of the task

Everyone works at a slightly different stress level. The way Gary Mack puts it is this: One athlete might be a Porche, and another might be a pickup truck. They need different things to run perfectly.

A basketball center has an entirely different task than a point guard, just like how a marathon runner differs from a sprinter in terms of the length of the event.

So, you’re probably wondering, “What does the performance curve involve?”

Take a look:

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It takes the right balance of stress and energy to reach optimal performance. As mentioned in the Pressure Principle blog post, pressure can be a positive or negative force, but you’ll always need a bit to perform. The rest is up to you. When Mack tells athletes to “know their numbers,” what he’s really saying is, “How stressed do you need to be to perform your best, and how long can you perform before you’re too tired?”

The second caveat to knowing your numbers is to also know your early warning signs—those bodily reactions that tell you you’re in danger of going into burn-out or breakdown. Like your numbers, your early warning signs will be to unique to you. For some, it’s an elevated heart rate. For others, it’s sweating, heavy breathing, a churning stomach, or tensed muscles. Then, it turns into negative self-talk and a panicked mind. If you get that far, your peak performance is long gone.

Found your number? Now, try this:

Play back a game where you feel you didn’t perform your best.

Think about how you felt when you went into it. What number were you at? Was it higher than YOUR number? Or lower?

If your number was higher:

Calm yourself down before you play the game or perform. That could mean breathwork, a bit of visualization at the mind gym, or listening to tranquil music and meditation before you start.

If your number was too low:

Put on some pump-up music and visualize yourself making every pass, every play, every moment perfectly. Get yourself up to that number for the moment you take center stage.

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Think of yourself like a guitar. If your strings are too tight, you’ll snap. Too loose, and you’re out of tune.

Here are Mack’s closing thoughts on knowing your numbers (and what to do about it when you do):

“You can't control your performance until you are in control of yourself. What you're thinking. How you're feeling. Most importantly, your physiology. Know your numbers and your early warning signs.” - Gary Mack