Pre-competition nerves: what to do in the final hour

Your hands are shaking, your pulse is in your throat, you have been to the toilet four times, and there are still 50 minutes to go. The goal is not to make that feeling disappear — people who compete well feel it too, they have just worked out what to do with it. What follows is a plan for that last hour, one you can run in a changing room with no kit and no help.

What your body is actually doing

Adrenaline and noradrenaline climb before you compete, and your body behaves as though the effort has already started. Your heart rate sits 20 to 40 beats above resting, breathing goes shallow and quick, and blood shifts towards the large muscles, which is why your hands go cold and clammy. Dry mouth, a tight stomach and constant trips to the toilet come from the same switch being flipped.

None of this is a malfunction. The trouble only starts when arousal climbs past the point where you can still control the movement. For raw effort — a sprint, a maximal lift, a push — high arousal costs you little and sometimes helps. For anything that needs precision and a steady hand, too much of it ruins the performance before you have begun.

The hour, block by block

The usual mistake is letting those 60 minutes run with no structure, so you fill them with your phone and with watching everyone else. This layout works for most meets, trials and testing days.

• 60–45 min: phone in the bag, a sip of water (150–250 ml), a last light snack if you need one. Do not audit anyone else's warm-up sets — comparing yourself to other people in the gym only works against you here.
• 45–30 min: general warm-up, 8 to 12 minutes, until you have a light sweat and your breathing deepens on its own.
• 30–15 min: specific warm-up. Three to five ascending sets, the last one around 85–90 per cent of your opener. No more than that.
• 15–5 min: two to three minutes of breathing, then quiet. Same corner, same headphones, same track.
• 5–0 min: one technical thought, then go.

Breathing that genuinely slows the heart

The evidence is strongest for something very plain: an exhale longer than the inhale slows the heart down. You do not need a named technique or an app.

Breathe in through the nose for four seconds, out for six to eight, and repeat eight to ten times. That takes about two minutes and is enough to drop your pulse a few beats and move your breathing out of your chest. A second option that works just as well: two short nasal inhales back to back, then one long exhale through the mouth, five times.

Two warnings. Light-headedness or tingling fingers means you have gone too fast and too deep — slow down. And do not sink into ten minutes of deep relaxation right before an explosive effort; two or three minutes settles you, ten flattens you. For more on the timing and the dose, see breathing to calm down.

Routine beats willpower

A pre-performance routine helps because it removes decisions, and a racing heart makes you a poor decision-maker. Warm up in the same order you use in training, over roughly the same 15 to 20 minutes, with the same cues.

Write it out the day before: which exercises, how many sets, what loads, at what clock time. This is where a training log earns its keep — your recall on competition day is worse than you think, and paper remembers properly.

Where you point your attention

Excitement and fear share almost the same physical signature: same heart rate, same cold hands, same stomach. What you can change is the label you put on it. Research generally supports reframing — a line like "this is readiness, not panic" holds up better than trying to switch the feeling off. Switching it off does not work, and then it feels like you have failed twice.

The second half is attention. You cannot control the outcome, and you can partly control the execution. Pick one or two technical cues — "chest up", "breathe out at the bottom", "first three steps short" — and stay on them. More than two cues and you lose yourself in your own head.

A short mental rehearsal helps: 30 to 60 seconds, from your own point of view, at real speed, covering only the first rep or the first few metres. That overlaps with what meditation and mental training actually give athletes — attention that returns to the task, rather than calm at any price.

What quietly makes it worse

• An extra hit of caffeine "just in case". Another 200 mg on top of an already high heart rate buys you tremor, not focus. If you normally use it, take the same dose you take in training.
• Anything new on the day: new shoes, a new belt, an unfamiliar pre-workout, food you have never eaten before a session.
• Twenty minutes of scrolling, or a conversation with someone who is properly panicking. Agitation spreads faster than advice.
• Telling yourself the bad-night story. One poor night lowers maximal strength only slightly — far less than it feels like at the time. Sleep matters across weeks, but a single night is no reason to write the day off in advance.
• A "check" rep with a heavy load during the warm-up. If it goes up, you have spent energy; if it does not, you have wrecked your confidence ten minutes before the start.

When to see a doctor

Nerves on their own are not a medical problem. See a doctor if you get chest pain or pressure, fainting or the sense that you are about to faint, an irregular heartbeat that does not settle 20 to 30 minutes after you have sat down, or breathlessness out of proportion to the effort.

The same applies if the pounding heart, shaking and dread turn up away from competition, on ordinary days, or if you are having genuine panic attacks. That is treatable, and it says nothing about your mental toughness.

The short version

• Shaking, cold hands and repeat toilet trips are your body preparing, not a sign that something is wrong.
• Split the hour into blocks: phone away, general warm-up, specific warm-up, two minutes of breathing, one technical cue.
• Make the exhale longer than the inhale — 4 seconds in, 6 to 8 out, eight to ten cycles — and stop at two or three minutes.
• Warm up exactly as you do in training and write the plan out the day before; fewer decisions means a steadier head.
• Introduce nothing new on the day, especially not extra caffeine, and never test your form with a heavy single in the warm-up.