Sprintgeezer wrote:
You MUST be mentally alert, and IMO your mental state must exceed your physical state in order for you to get sprint/power benefit during a workout. You should NEVER be mentally, or emotionally, fatigued, even at the end of a workout, unless it is a workout of 400's, and it's 110F outside, and you're severely dehydrated because you screwed up.
I believe that if your physical state is good enough for the coming workout, the mental state is where it should be. No need to exceed the physical state. Trying to psyche yourself to reach 100% out of you in a workout is counterproductive in the long term, you may improve weeks and then plateau or even get slower/weaker. In that case you probably have overstressed the CNS. This is very common with sprinters. I believe that better way to handle near maximum efforts is taking the session as relaxed as possible, mentally and physically, taking only about 95-97% or so out of your body. The CNS etc. will be less stressed after the workout and you recover quicker, and can do more often workouts that stresses the CNS a lot. Even stressing about coming workout is a sign that maybe you aim taking too much out of you, even the mental stress stresses the CNS. Take it more relaxed, do the session, recover, repeat when ready for it. Save the 100% for races. But there´s the hard part of racing. Ease of speed is hard to reach if you mentally try to force your body at 100%. Many sprinters struggle in races because of loosing the relaxation. Maybe you would have been faster even thinking like "oh well, only I have to do is to run @97%, it´s not that hard".