Roy Janssen of Hayabusa, your 4-way Agony Uncle, answers questions and gives practical advice to budding jumpers.

Dear Roy

I am now my second year in a 4-way team. Last year, we had very good training, doing about 120 jumps over two camps and we were flying very well together. But when we got to Nationals, it was a disaster! We started with a bad round, and then it just seemed to get worse from there. After round 3, I just couldn’t wait for the meet to be over. Even the usual fun we have together was gone, and the dirtdiving just seemed frustrating and hard work. It was our first competition together. Now I am looking forward to the training but I’m already getting worried the same thing will happen at Nationals. Maybe we would be better not to do the meet and just train instead?

Hope you can help, Hans

Hi Hans,

The main reason why it didn’t work out well is the lack of competition experience with this line-up. Preparing for a Meet is a very important phase that you need to implement into your team training. We can be great flyers in training, but we need to learn how to put this performance level into competition, and even kick it up a notch. Preparation and Meet experience is all it takes to give you that peak performance we are all looking for.

Meet Pressure

The biggest difference between training and competition jumps is the mental aspect. During training everything is more relaxed and with not much pressure. Nobody will judge your performance and if you have a bad jump, you can laugh with it, buy the team a beer and that’s it. In competition we don’t laugh with it any more when something goes wrong. We feel more embarrassed and angry and put more pressure on ourselves to make up for the mistake we made.

Train Like you Compete

How do we make the (mental) transition from training into competition as small as possible? Everything starts first of all in our training. We need to train as we fight! During each jumps we need to put more focus, more energy and be more disciplined with ourselves. We have to ‘raise our standards’ and it is a process that never ends.

Love the Fight

There is also the emotional part that we need to train and this experience mainly comes from doing real competitions. What we want to avoid is to go through an ‘emotional roller-coaster’. We can’t be down if we did a bad round, but neither can we be on a high after a successful jump. Learning to go through ups and downs, be in the lead or fight back from behind are all skills we need to learn. But the biggest trick to be successful in competitions is to learn to love the fight! Once you can enjoy the excitement and the battles, it is easy to stay calm. And a calm state of mind is the key for success.

Calm but Focused

The thing you want is to be really focused and to be calm at the same time. If we stay calm our body flies the best, the muscles are relaxed and react faster and smoother. Also our vision is open, we can see what is happening and we can anticipate to things when needed.

This topic is very interesting and there is so much to say about it. The main thing is the meet preparation that starts in your normal training and getting that important competition experience. There are many tips that can help, but in the end we all need to find our own way of how to deal with it. Good luck!!