The Outside Interview: Dr. Michael Gervais on Mental Mastery

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2017

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For most athletes, achieving peak performance means training hard, eating right, and maybe some stretching. But when you get to the elite level, where everyone’s doing that, it’s the mental game that makes winners and losers. How hard can you push your body? How much pain can you tolerate? How can you avoid getting psyched out before a big event? If you’re a top-tier professional athlete trying to train your brain, you’re likely going to turn to Michael Gervais, a renowned expert in high-performance psychology. His clients include the Seattle Seahawks, various Olympians, and Felix Baumgartner, that guy who jumped to earth from the edge of space. In this second installment of our four-part look at the science of performance, Outside editor Christopher Keyes sits down with Dr. Gervais to ask what advice he has for the rest of us.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by the North Face and its new Ventrix jacket, the best jacket in the world.
0:08.0	At least according to the best climber in the world, Alex Hundled.
0:12.0	I mean, the Ventrix is legitimately my favorite jacket I think I've ever had.
0:17.0	You know, climbing things in the winter in the shade, I was basically just like climbing in the jacket all the time.
0:21.0	It just works really well. Alex Arnold is right on the time. It just works really well.
0:23.0	Alex Hahnel is right on the verge of becoming a household name, but if you're not familiar,
0:27.0	he's one of those once-in-a-generation athletes that sort of redefines what's possible in a sport.
0:32.0	He holds all sorts of speed records and
0:34.3	this year climbed to El Cap in Yosemite without a rope. But when I talked to him
0:39.0	it was really clear that he really likes this jacket. For me one of the things that I really like about the Benric since it's super resilient, basically
0:48.0	it's really rugged.
0:49.0	I climbed quite a bit in it and I was climbing chimneys and wide cracks and basically just like rubbing it against rock for
0:55.0	hundreds or thousands of feet and it, you know, it's got like two tiny little holes.
0:58.9	It's like a really rugged jacket.
1:01.3	In your own words, how does the jacket actually work?
1:04.0	I think it's magic.
1:06.0	No, I mean, I have no idea how the jacket works.
1:09.0	What he does know is that it's light, durable, tough, and it dynamic venting adjusts to your body temperature to keep you cool as
1:16.2	you heat up.
1:17.4	So you can spend more time climbing, less time changing clothes.
1:21.5	Not that Alex would have any experience with that since he lives in a van and
1:25.1	only owns one pair of clothes. I mean you know it's just some extent I do own a
	...

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