Anatomy of the Choke "paralysis by analysis"

We have all experienced it at some point,

The big day, the final, that moment when you know you have to perform at your best to win, 100 metre final, football derby, national trials, tennis cup match to name a few. You know you can play that winning serve or running that sub 11second race in training but when it comes to the big day you choke!

Choking is that moment when it all goes wrong, you under achieve, you simply cannot perform the best you know you can. Wikipedia calls it "the failure of an athlete or an athletic team to win a game or tournament when the player or team had been strongly favoured to win." Why?

here are some famous examples:
England football team in penalties
AC Milan football in champions league final 2005
New Zealand rugby union in previous world cups (lost their choker title in the last cup)
Golf, Rory Mcllroy in the 2011 masters
Mike Tyson vs Holyfield boxing
(Picture above: Cristiano Ronaldo missing a penalty last week knocking Real Madrid out of the champions league, prior to that shot he had only failed to score one penalty out of 24)

There are many many examples of choking happening and in most cases its when the outcome is incredibly important to the team or sportsman. so why??

The easiest way to explain it is to divide the brain into two areas of control; conscious control (mainly the cerebrum) and unconscious control (mainly cerebellum), call it CN and UCN.
The hours and hours and hours of training you do trains your muscle memory to put the control of certain actions (such as the cycling pedal stroke or swimming swim stroke) under UCN control.
Actions during your sport become almost automatic, the tiny movements by all your muscles adjusted for that perfect action you have trained and trained happens in the millisecond perfect timing  that makes your actions swift and smooth.

Now, when you are choking that changes, you are concentrating so hard on performing your best, you start thinking about what every muscle is doing and the timing and the force and the angles... its too much for you to handle. Not only that but it takes up valuable brain power for thinking about tactics, nutrition all the important decisions we have to make during that epic final or race. The actions of your sport are under CN control and not the UCN that makes it so smooth, that made you perform so well in previous races/matches.
A great way I read to describe it is:"paralysis by analysis"

So, how does one prevent choking??
Well its not easy, and its certainly easier said than done.
First things first, practice practice practice, for me and you that means swim swim swim run run run bike bike bike. The more practised you are, the more your actions (or the more of your actions) are under UCN control. It has been shown that it takes 10,000 hours to truly master something at an elite level, thats alot of practise.
Secondly, the big day, you have to relax, you have to let go.
(A scientific method of this is to close your eyes and take deep breathes, focusing on 'relaxing the back of your eyes', theory is that it shifts your thinking away from the pre frontal cortex.).
over-thinking, over-excitement and over-analysing the situation is what is causing choking. Freeing your CN brain from working on all those UCN actions will give you valuable thinking space for strategies and will leave those guts decisions and intuitive actions to your UCN that is well trained to make the right decision.


So get training, chill out in your finals, don't think about the consequences, just relax into the sport you have training hard for hours almost every day.