“Athletes who want to enhance their performance need to be aware of what they are in control of, as that gives them the ability to act.”
At 17, Janne Mortensen was an elite badminton player in Denmark. Her parents played professionally and she grew up watching them. When she turned 6, she followed them into the game.
“I played every single day for 10 years,” she recalls.
Mortensen came from a small town. As she progressed within the league, she travelled to compete. Her teenage life was busy. Seeing her friends lead normal lives, she began to wonder what she was missing. The teenager felt pressure not only to perform at an elite level, but also from her friends who wanted to hang out on the weekends.
The thoughts turned into frustrations, and soon affected her performance.
“I lost the drive and I didn’t know how to get it back,” Mortensen says. “I gave up.”
Looking back, the 28-year-old doesn’t sugar coat her experience. She says she stopped doing what she loved and what she was good at because she couldn’t control her mind.
“I improved my skill set, technique and physique, but not my mind,” she explains. “So I quit.”
Mortensen moved on to competitive boxing for three years — college and career — but found that life’s pressures still stifled her progress.
“I couldn’t handle the mental aspect of anything,” she explains.
When Mortensen identified her bottleneck and confronted it, her life changed.
“I wanted to understand how the body and mind were connected, and how to train the brain to overcome things,” she says.
For the next several years, Mortensen immersed herself in education.
At the University of British Columbia, she studied cognitive neuroscience, exercise, sport psychology and coaching. When she returned to Europe, she attended the University of Lund in Sweden, studying mental-skills training, leadership and communication. She completed her education with graduate degrees in physical education and psychology from the University of Copenhagen.
“For the past six years, I read every book I could, went to every lecture I found and took every course possible that dealt with mental training, coaching and sports psychology,” Mortensen says.
It was during this immersion in cognitive training that Mortensen stumbled upon CrossFit Copenhagen.
“My competitive nature kicked in and I decided that I had to learn CrossFit,” she says. “I kept going back because I wanted to complete workouts feeling comfortable doing so.”
Through CrossFit, Mortensen learned about her body’s limitations. From the start, she wanted to try it all at 100 percent. That resulted in a minor back injury.
“I learned to be aware of body signals,” she says.
Today, Mortensen mentally walks through how she’s going to complete specific workouts and creates mantras that vary from day to day.
“I tell myself something that I believe in and that makes sense for that specific day,” she explains. “Last night it was: ‘Keep going. If you want to become faster, you need to move.’ So my WOD words were ‘Keep going, faster, move.’”
Mortensen says she believes mental training not only helps her continue when she feels physically uncomfortable, but also keeps emotions from becoming overwhelming.
“When I played badminton, my emotional state was my biggest hurdle,” she notes.
A year into CrossFit, Mortensen began offering free mental-training sessions for fellow CrossFitters and runners, as well as football and handball players to get her feet wet. She says she also was determining if her chosen career path was still right for her. Helping other athletes work on their mental game and seeing them progress gave her the proof she needed.
Since then, Mortensen has helped CrossFitters overcome their fear of box jumps, become more comfortable during open-gym time, deal with performance anxiety and maintain focus even when it’s physically painful.
“How I help them depends on their specific challenge,” Mortensen explains.
This year, she worked with Team Butcher’s Garage as the group prepared for the Europe Regional.
“We spoke about how to use every challenge to become stronger as a team,” Mortensen says. “Team members were assigned different roles.”
She advocated team cohesion by focusing on the team’s values, goals and strategies. The squad set rules and guidelines to follow during the competition.
Mortensen has also worked with Anders Galaly and Philipp Hargett. When coaching individual athletes, she says she emphasizes control.
“Athletes who want to enhance their performance need to be aware of what they are in control of, as that gives them the ability to act,” she says.
Athletes spend too much time thinking about variables they can’t control, Mortensen adds.
After speaking to Mortensen, Galaly says he values mental preparation almost as much as physical training.
“If you are mentally prepared, you can break through physical boundaries,” he says. “What I learned with Mortensen will help me through athletic, professional and personal challenges.”
In April, Mortensen started her Mentalwod blog, intended to give CrossFit athletes tools to enhance mental training.
“I want to spread the word of mental power. If you train mentally and physically, you will achieve that mental toughness that CrossFit requires,” she says.
“You can probably do a snatch-like movement if you see someone do it. But doing it correctly takes conscious practice to learn to move your body in a perfect way, for a perfect snatch. Mental training is the same. Doing it consciously allows you to change thought patterns, behaviors and emotions so they work for you as you are WODing.”
She says she hopes to help athletes understand there is no middle ground to achieving their highest potential.
“You’re in the game or you’re out,” she says.
Mental training is about dealing with every aspect of yourself, Mortensen says.
“You have to get rid of disturbing thoughts and find substitutes that will make you move faster and become stronger,” she explains.
When athletes learn to deal with obstacles in a way that doesn’t interfere with their performance, they have achieved mental prowess, she says.
“It is also about being mentally prepared for the worst,” Mortensen adds. “Because when you are prepared for the worst, you have no fear. Without fear, you have no pressure. And no pressure means better performance.”
