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Summary
On episode 392 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Dr. Michele Ufer, an internationally sought-after sports and management psychologist, speaker, coach, and mental trainer who works with athletes, executives, and other high performers, and a successful ultrarunner himself.
Michele argues that mind and body work as a team rather than mind ruling over body, and that mental training deserves its own place in a training plan instead of being an afterthought to mileage and intervals.
He walks through the mental preparation behind his 240 kilometer Atacama Desert race, run on just 15 weeks of training and a longest training run of only 29 kilometers, along with the specific self-talk habits, visualization techniques, and language shifts he uses to keep himself performing under pressure.
Links
- https://micheleufer.com
Key Takeaways
- Mind and body are teammates, not a hierarchy. Michele pushes back on the popular “mind over body” framing, arguing that top performance comes from the two working together rather than one dominating the other.
- Vivid mental imagery produces real physical reactions. His lemon experiment (imagining holding, smelling, and biting into a sour lemon) reliably makes people salivate or wince, proof that a detailed mental image alone can trigger a real bodily response.
- You can use sensory visualization to change how your body feels mid-race. Michele used an image of ocean waves washing over his feet to keep them feeling fresh during an 80 kilometer stretch of desert running, and finished the Atacama race with no blisters at all.
- Avoid negation-based self-talk. Telling yourself “don’t stiffen up” or “don’t put so much pressure on yourself” backfires because the brain has to first picture the thing being denied, which pulls focus in the wrong direction. Better to state what you want instead: “stay relaxed.”
- Swap “must” and “try” for language that removes pressure. “I must train today” and “I will try” both build in resistance and an expectation of difficulty. Michele’s fix is to say “I will train today” instead, removing the friction the word choice creates.
- Track your self-talk like a diary to see your patterns. Reviewing past tough races or workouts and writing down what you were actually telling yourself in hard moments makes negative patterns visible enough to rewrite them in advance.
- Use a “thought stop” paired with a prepared positive replacement. When negative self-talk shows up, consciously stop it (a word, a gesture, a mental image) and immediately swap in a positive phrase you prepared beforehand, so your brain does not default back to the negative loop.
- Repeating a simple positive mantra can crowd out negative thoughts entirely. During a brutal first day of a multi-day race in Russia, Michele repeated “I feel fresh and relaxed” for hours, which left no room for negative self-talk and, he notes, is backed by research showing this kind of repetition can lower perceived exertion.
- Michele’s strategies to get and stay well: love what you actually do rather than chasing someone else’s version of fitness; make sure you are having fun while doing it instead of just grinding through it; and stay aware of what your own body genuinely needs, since he sees many people lose touch with listening to themselves.
“You move in the direction you focus on.”
Dr. Michele Ufer
