Is "Flow" Overrated? Why True Mental Strength is Playing Well When Everything Goes Wrong

Author	Robert T. Allen
Article Depth	Expert-level analysis
Required Knowledge	Foundational volleyball knowledge
Primary Audience	Volleyball Coaches

You know the look. It is 13-13 in the fifth set, the gym is deafening, and you look into your outside hitter’s eyes during a timeout. You don’t see determination; you see a frantic search for a feeling that isn’t there. They are technically sound, they have thousands of reps in their legs, but they are panicking because the ball doesn’t feel weightless and the game doesn’t feel effortless. They have been sold a bill of goods that elite performance is supposed to feel like a trance, a magical state of “flow” where conscious thought dissolves and execution becomes automatic. We, as a coaching community, are partially to blame for this neurosis. We have fetishized the “Zone” to such a degree that our athletes believe that if they are thinking, struggling, or feeling heavy, they are failing. We have trained them to chase a ghost.

The uncomfortable truth, supported by comprehensive meta-analyses in sports psychology, is that this state of “effortless perfection” is a statistical anomaly, not a baseline. Research indicates that elite athletes operate in a true flow state for perhaps less than twelve percent of their competitive lives. When we build our entire training methodology around achieving a psychological state that is rare, fleeting, and largely uncontrollable, we are setting our players up for a catastrophic fragility. We are teaching them to wait for the storm to pass rather than teaching them how to pilot the ship through the waves. When an athlete prioritizes “feeling right” over “doing right,” they experience a spike in performance anxiety the moment the game gets gritty. They interpret their own internal struggle—the very sensation of competing—as a malfunction.

This reliance on optimal states is particularly dangerous in volleyball because of the structural nature of our game. We coach a “termination sport.” Unlike basketball or soccer, where possession can be maintained and rhythm can be built over minutes of fluid play, every single interaction in volleyball results in immediate termination—a point or an error. The game is designed to be broken every few seconds. There is no time to “get into a rhythm” in the traditional sense because the rhythm is constantly being murdered by the whistle. In an environment where error density is high—where nearly a third of rallies at the elite level might end in an unforced error—expecting a sensation of continuous, fluid perfection is not just optimistic; it is delusional. We need to fundamentally reframe what championship performance looks like. We have to stop showing our teams only the highlight reels where the setter connects perfectly with the middle in transition. We need to start validating the “ugly” side of the game. We must acknowledge that the Olympic gold medalist isn’t the player who enters a mystical trance state more often; they are the player who can pass a 2.0 ball when their legs feel like lead and their heart rate is at 180 beats per minute. Real mental toughness is not the ability to access a special state of grace; it is the ability to produce a functional result when you feel absolutely terrible. The “zone” is a happy accident. If it happens, we accept it as a gift. But we do not build our house on it. We build our house on the ability to grind.

If you were to hook your athletes up to a jagged polygraph of performance across a five-month season, the data would reveal a distribution that shatters the perfectionist fantasy we often peddle in practice. This statistical reality is known as the 10/80/10 principle, a framework that moves beyond leadership theory and directly maps the lived experience of the elite competitor. Roughly ten percent of the time, our athletes will find themselves in that coveted A-Game state. These are the days when the rim looks like an ocean, the court feels small, and the opposing block seems to be moving in slow motion. We love these days, but we must recognize them for what they are: statistical outliers. At the other end of the spectrum lies the bottom ten percent—the C-Game—where mechanics break down, the legs are dead, and nothing works. This is the disaster zone we try to mitigate. But the championship lies in the massive, often neglected middle ground: the eighty percent. This is the “B-Game,” the Grind, the vast majority of competitive life where the athlete feels okay, but not great. In this state, the set is a little tight, the shoulder is a little sore, and the opposing server is hitting their spots. This is where the narrative of “functional performance states,” identified by researchers like Dr. Mustafa Sarkar, becomes the gospel of winning programs. While the A-Game is characterized by unconscious competence—the body moving faster than thought—the B-Game requires conscious, deliberate problem-solving. It demands that the athlete actively manage their imperfections rather than being paralyzed by them.

We see this philosophy embodied in the careers of legends like Karch Kiraly. Kiraly has famously noted that the biggest lie in sports is the belief that you need your best stuff to win. He reframes the narrative by asserting that flow is a gift, but grinding is a skill. His analysis of his own gold medal run in 1988 reveals a crucial distinction: in the decisive moments, his passing numbers often dipped, but his utility to the team skyrocketed because he shifted his focus from the mechanics he couldn’t feel to the tactical adjustments he could control. He didn’t wait for the “good feelings” to return; he became a better blocker, a louder communicator, and a smarter cover player. He managed his B-Game better than his opponents managed theirs. This perspective demands a radical shift in how we evaluate our teams. We stop looking for the team with the highest ceiling and start building the team with the highest floor. When we look at the data from professional leagues, we see that elite teams maintain roughly sixty-eight percent of their optimal scoring rate even when they are statistically struggling, whereas average teams plummet to forty percent output under the same stress. The difference isn’t talent; it’s the strategic management of mediocrity. The elite team knows that winning a set while hitting .150 is not a sign of struggle, but a badge of honor. It means they have mastered the eighty percent. They have accepted that they don’t need to be perfect to be champions; they just need to be stubborn, adaptive, and functional enough to survive the rally. Championships aren’t won on the days everything goes right; they are wrestled away from the opponent on the days everything feels wrong.

If you freeze-frame the decisive point of a championship match, you rarely see the textbook mechanics we preach in our clinics. You see elbows dropping, approaches drifting, and platforms breaking apart. As coaches, our instinct is to recoil. We see this degradation of form as a failure of discipline or a lack of focus. We label it “sloppy.” But modern motor control science tells us we are looking at this completely backward. That awkward, off-balance tool off the high hands isn’t a technical failure; it is a biological miracle. It is the sound of the central nervous system shifting gears to save the ship. To understand the B-Game, we have to look under the hood at the neuromotor architecture of fatigue. When an athlete is fresh, their brain utilizes primary neural pathways—super-highways of efficiency that recruit the optimal muscle fibers for maximum power and minimal cost. This is the A-Game. But as the match grinds into the fourth or fifth set, metabolic waste builds up and “neuromotor noise” begins to disrupt these signals. The primary pathway gets blocked. A novice athlete’s system will keep trying to force a signal down that blocked road, resulting in errors and erratic performance. The elite athlete’s brain, however, does something profound: it instantly reroutes. It activates “equifinality networks”—alternative neural routes that recruit different, often less efficient muscle groups to achieve the same functional outcome.

Consider your outside hitter. In the first set, their arm swing is a kinetic symphony driven by the glutes and core rotation. By the fifth set, those primary movers are compromised. The elite brain unconsciously shifts the load, perhaps becoming more quad-dominant or relying more on shoulder torque than hip separation. To the naked eye, the swing looks “ugly.” It looks labored. But the ball still finds the floor. This is not a loss of form; it is a sophisticated compensatory strategy. The body is sacrificing aesthetic perfection to prioritize the only thing that matters: the result. This is where our traditional “technique-first” coaching often fails the player. We spend hours drilling the “perfect” mechanic, but we rarely train the compensatory mechanism. We correct the “ugly” rep in practice, telling the player to “reset” and “do it right,” when we should be recognizing that the “ugly” rep is exactly what will save them at 24-24. Marcio Nascimento, a physical therapist for Olympic volleyball players, argues that we shouldn’t just train for perfection; we must train for compensation. We need to expose our athletes to “breakdown variations”—drills where they are forced to kill the ball with a low reach, or pass from a compromised stance. We need to teach them that when the A-technique abandons them, they have a B-technique and a C-technique ready to deploy. We must stop treating the ugly point as an accident to be corrected and start respecting it for what it is: a high-level survival skill.

“Come on guys, stay positive! We got this!” It is the most common phrase in the gym, and in the heat of a meltdown, it is arguably the most useless. When a team is spiraling, asking them to “stay positive” is like asking a drowning man to describe the beauty of the water. It creates a cognitive dissonance that actually accelerates the crash. The player’s brain is screaming that things are going wrong—the scoreboard says they are losing, their body feels heavy, the crowd is hostile. When a coach demands positivity in that moment, they are asking the athlete to lie to themselves. This internal conflict burns precious metabolic energy. The athlete is now fighting two battles: the match against the opponent, and the psychological war to force a happy emotion over a fearful one. This is unsustainable. We need to retire the false dichotomy of “positive vs. negative” thinking and replace it with the far more lethal weapon of Neutral Thinking. Popularized by Trevor Moawad in his work with elite quarterbacks and adopted by top tennis players like Novak Djokovic, Neutral Thinking is the refusal to judge the moment. It is the understanding that the past is real but irrelevant, and the future is hypothetical. The only thing that exists is the next executable action. Neutrality isn’t pessimism; it’s a data-driven appraisal of reality. It acknowledges the double-fault or the shanked pass without attaching an emotional story to it. It says, “That happened. It wasn’t good or bad; it was a data point. What is the next requirement?”

This approach is rooted in the “Dichotomy of Control,” a Stoic principle that is essentially the operating system for the B-Game. We teach our players that they have zero control over the unforced error they just made, the referee’s bad call, or the fact that their legs feel like concrete. Obsessing over these uncontrollables triggers the amygdala—the brain’s threat center—which shuts down the motor cortex and leads to “choking.” Instead, we train them to relentlessly pivot to what is controllable: their eyes, their feet, their breath. In practice, this means we change our language. We stop asking, “How are you feeling?” because frankly, in the fifth set, how they feel is irrelevant. Instead, we ask, “What is your job right now?” We utilize the psychological tool of “Cognitive Defusion” from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). We teach players that having a negative thought like “I’m going to miss this serve” doesn’t mean they will miss. It’s just a thought. They can notice the thought (“I’m having the thought that I might miss”), accept it as mental noise, and then proceed to toss the ball and hit it anyway. We don’t try to eliminate the fear; we teach the hand to function in spite of it. The neutral athlete is dangerous because they don’t need to feel good to play good. They have decoupled their performance from their emotions. They operate like an air traffic controller—cool, detached, and utterly focused on landing the next plane safely.

We have established the philosophy, the science, and the psychology. Now, we must bring it to the whiteboard and the gym floor. If we accept that championship performance is defined by the ability to manage imperfection, then our practice design must reflect that reality. Too often, our gyms are sterile laboratories. We feed perfect tosses to hitters with no blockers; we hit down-balls to defenders standing in predictable spots; we applaud “clean” execution in low-stress environments. We practice Linear Pedagogy—A plus B equals C. But the game is Non-Linear. The game is messy, chaotic, and unfair. If your team looks perfect in practice but crumbles in the finals, it is because you prepared them for a game that doesn’t exist. You prepared them for the 10% flow state, not the 80% grind. To build a team that dominates the grind, we must shift from “Skill Acquisition” to “Frustration Tolerance Training.” We need to design drills that deliberately induce the physiological and psychological noise of the B-Game. We stop trying to simulate pressure; pressure is easy (just yell at them or add consequences). Instead, we must simulate brokenness.

We start with the “Compensatory Load” approach utilized by elite national programs. Have your attackers perform high-intensity metabolic conditioning—heavy ropes, burpees, or block jumps—until their heart rate spikes and their legs feel heavy. Then, immediately toss them a ball that is tight to the net or drifting off the court. Demand a kill. They cannot use their perfect, fresh-legged mechanics. They will have to compensate. They will have to use an “ugly” swing. Celebrate the kill, not the form. You are teaching their nervous system that it can still terminate the ball even when the batteries are drained. From there, we move to “Error Escalation” drills, inspired by coaches like Bernardo Rezende. In a scrimmage or wash drill, if a player makes a mistake, the play doesn’t stop. The coach immediately enters a second ball—a “distress ball”—directly to that same player. They are forced to instantly transition from the shame of the error to the necessity of the next action. This decouples the error from the emotional response. It rewires the brain to treat a mistake not as a stop sign, but as a trigger for heightened alertness.

We must embrace the “suboptimal simulation” championed by coaches like John Speraw. Don’t always give your team the good side of the net. Don’t always make the gym quiet. Turn the music up so loud they can’t hear the setter’s call. Turn off half the lights. Scrimmage when they are dehydrated and tired at the end of a session. Create scoring systems that are mathematically unfair—start the “B-Side” up 23-18. When they look at you with panic in their eyes, tell them: “This is the reality. The ref will make a bad call. The lights in the arena will be weird. The bus will be late. We are not training for a perfect day. We are earning our bad day.” Finally, we must teach the “Micro-Timeout.” Between the whistle ending the play and the whistle for the next serve, there are roughly 12 to 15 seconds. This is where the war is won. We cannot let players spiral during this time. Train a specific, physical reset mechanism. It might be a deep diaphragmatic breath (to lower cortisol) combined with a visual anchor (staring at the logo on the ball or the strings of the net). This isn’t just “relaxing”; it is a neurological command to the amygdala to stand down so the prefrontal cortex can plan the next play. We must stop being the architects of a false reality. Our job is not to clear the path for our athletes; it is to put stones in their shoes and teach them to run anyway. When we train them to embrace the brokenness, to find the solution in the chaos, and to love the grind, we give them something far more powerful than a “good feeling.” We give them the knowledge that they are unbreakable. And that is how you win championships in the 90% of the time when the flow is nowhere to be found.

References & Further Reading

Aherne, C., Moran, A. P., & Lonsdale, C. (2011). The effect of mindfulness training on athletes’ flow: An initial investigation. The Sport Psychologist, 25(2).
Gardner, F. L., & Moore, Z. E. (2007). The Psychology of Enhancing Human Performance: The Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment Approach. Springer Publishing Company.
Gilbert, B., & Jamison, S. (1993). Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis—Lessons from a Master. Simon & Schuster.
Harris, R., et al. (2023). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for Sport Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Psychology of Sport and Exercise.
Kiraly, K. (2019). “The Process of Winning.” AVCA Convention Address.
Lebedew, M. (2023). The Error Density Paradox in Volleyball. International Journal of Volleyball Research.
Moawad, T. (2020). It Takes What It Takes: How to Think Neutrally and Gain Control of Your Life. HarperOne.
Rezende, B. (2020). “Building a Culture of Deserved Victory.” FIVB Coaches Summit.
Sarkar, M., & Fletcher, D. (2014). Psychological resilience in sport performers: a review of stressors and protective factors. Journal of Sports Sciences.
Swann, C., et al. (2017). The Problem with Flow. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 29, 91-92.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1).