What is the flow state, and how can you reach it through sport?

Have you ever experienced those moments of pure grace? You feel so aligned with yourself and so focused that it feels like you’re experiencing something intense, where nothing seems impossible. This is what we call the flow state. The good news: finding your own and entering it with every challenge is possible. Jérémie Clautour, a mental performance coach, explains how.

Sporting performance is as much a matter of mindset as it is of physical ability.

Whatever your level and the sport you practice, you’ve probably noticed it. Your consistency, your progress, your results, and your performance don’t depend on your muscles alone.

Your mindset plays a key role: it’s where your motivation lives, it pushes you to go beyond your limits, to last a little longer and push a little harder than last time. It gets you to lace up your running shoes even when, deep down, you’d rather stay on the couch with a good book. And like a muscle, the mind can be trained.

Jérémie Clautourexplains: “Mental preparation means learning to align the three Cs: body, brain, and heart. You can be the most physically trained person on earth, but if you falter when the moment comes, all of that is useless. Training your mind means learning to optimize your psychological and emotional resources just as much as your physical ones.”

This is all the more important because our daily lives are often eaten away by stress. “We get stuck in a vicious circle: our heads are full of a thousand concerns. That affects our sleep and recovery, we wake up tired, negative thoughts pile up, and it spills over into every aspect of our lives, not just sport. Mental preparation teaches us how to regulate all of this.”

The flow state: the peak of mental preparation

The goal? Reaching the flow state. This concept was developed byMihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 1970s. It refers to a state of total concentration, in which emotions and sensations are fully harnessed for performance and learning.

“To experience this optimal state, we first perceive how demanding the task is and how we view the resources we have to carry it out. If the task seems beyond our resources, we move into stress, even anxiety. If, on the contrary, it feels far below what we’re capable of, we get bored.

The flow state lies in the balance between our level of skill and the level of challenge. As the perceived difficulty of the task increases, if our perceived resources increase in proportion, we reach and maintain this ultimate experience. To put it simply, the flow state means managing four components: bodily sensations, thoughts, attitude, and emotions.

When we have too much on our minds, we feel like an overcharged battery, everything moves too fast, we’re overstimulated.

On the other hand, when we’re tired, unmotivated, and everything feels heavy, we’re understimulated. Switching from one to the other creates big waves, which can be exhausting and harmful to both performance and recovery. The challenge, especially for athletes, is to get to know themselves well enough to identify their highs and lows, manage them better, and stay as close as possible to the flow state.”

How can you train your mind to reach your flow state?

Mental performance professionals have a whole range of tools to sharpen one’s ability to access flow.

Jérémie Clautour particularly likes working with the concept of inner weather as a starting point. This classic tool makes it possible to diagnose, in just a few seconds, one’s physiological and physical state. It develops self-awareness and helps detect whether someone is overstimulated or understimulated, so the right resources can be mobilized.

The goal is to reach an optimal level of stress, in line with the Yerkes–Dodson law, which establishes a direct link between stress levels and performance. If stress is too low, we fluctuate between boredom and apathy (or even sleep). If it’s too high, fatigue sets in, anxiety grows, sometimes leading to burnout. An optimal level of stress leads to the flow state: you feel confident and fully in control of your abilities. That’s where progress and performance happen.

The mental performance coach also works a lot on breathing and relaxation exercises. “I present it as an appointment you make with yourself. I help the people I coach anchor this reflex. I want them to allow their brain to disconnect and to identify intrusive thoughts so they can regulate them. Once you’ve mastered it, it only takes a few seconds, it recharges your batteries.” A form of express recovery.

As for breathing exercises, he strongly recommends them to athletes. “They help you gain clarity and concentration. Simply breathing calmly and deeply three times while focusing on the exhale works immediately!”

The best-kept secret of performance

An athlete himself, Jérémie Clautour is the first to apply the tools he shares with those he supports. But in his eyes, one stands far above all the others.

“Pleasure!” he exclaims

“Elite athletes have very structured preparation programs. It’s reassuring—everything is under control: training, nutrition, sleep. The brain is a survival organ, so when it feels in control, it’s capable of reaching the goals set for it, even very ambitious ones, especially in high-level athletes.

But sometimes, some no longer know why they’re doing it. It loses meaning. They endure it, and motivation fades. They produce less and less dopamine, which is like candy for the brain. Cortisol, the stress hormone, takes over. Recovery suffers, sleep worsens, and that’s when injuries appear. That’s why, when you take on a sporting challenge, it’s good to set a performance or technical goal, but above all, you need to ask yourself what kind of adventure you want to live. What do you want to feel? What would bring you pleasure? You have to enjoy yourself, it’s absolutely essential.”

For Jérémie Clautour, pleasure is fundamental to counter the constant pressure to perform that we all face. “Working on your inner dialogue is very effective, not just in sport. We try to free ourselves from the judgment of others to reconnect with ourselves. We question our limits, our strengths, our expectations. Then we set up small routines to get into the right mindset before an event. We learn to build our own bubble. That’s how we manage emotions and stress. Mental preparation means planting seeds ahead of time that we can draw on when the moment comes, to be in the best possible conditions.”

And what about recovery?

If the flow state allows for optimal performance, it’s also precious for supporting a calm return to baseline and effective recovery.

“At the end of an event, there’s no need to look at what others have done. We focus solely on what we’ve accomplished and the pride it brings. That way, we turn the experience we’ve just lived into learning, much like building a muscle.

We anchor positive memories; that feeds confidence and motivation. The brain loves that. All of this can be drawn upon whenever we need it, especially in moments when we feel under-stimulated. We’ll be able to release pressure, accept taking a break without seeing it as a failure. Today, physically or mentally, you weren’t at your best—but the real victory is that you knew how to regulate yourself and adjust your resources.”

Jérémie Clautour is a mental performance coach specializing in supporting adolescents and young adults. Find his best tips for managing stress and reaching your flow state on his LinkedIn profile.