I've used the same pre-set mental practice since my 20s. It didn't come from a sports psychologist — it came from watching Franco Columbu train. Here's what the C in COTI actually looks like.
The C in COTI is Concentrate. It comes first, before Overload, before Technique, before Intensity — and most people treat it as optional. It isn't.
My pre-set mental practice came from watching two people train more than from any textbook or coach. One of them was Arnold. The other was Franco Columbu.
I was deep in studying physical culture in my early 20s — reading everything, watching footage of the best bodybuilders of the 70s and 80s, trying to understand not just what they did but how they thought about what they were doing. What stood out about Franco, to anyone who watched him closely, was the stillness before a heavy set. Not just waiting — actually present to the set before it happened. His mind was already in the movement before his body began.
I started practicing what I understood of that deliberately. Before each working set, I take somewhere between ten and thirty seconds — usually closer to fifteen — and do three things.
First: I identify the specific muscle or muscles the set is designed to load. Not the movement. The target tissue. There's a difference. A row can be a back exercise or a bicep exercise depending on where your attention goes and how you set up the movement. I decide, before I touch the weight, which it's going to be.
Second: I run the set mentally. Not in detail — not rep by rep — just the arc of it. How it should feel to initiate the movement, where the tension should sit, what 'done' looks like. About three seconds of mental rehearsal.
Third: I take one deliberate breath, let my shoulders drop, and start.
This is not mysticism. What's happening has a physiological explanation. Mental rehearsal activates the same neural pathways used during physical execution — the motor cortex, the cerebellum, the neuromuscular connections that coordinate movement. Research on this goes back decades. Athletes who mentally rehearse before performing show measurably better neuromuscular recruitment than those who don't. It's motor control preparation, not visualization for its own sake.
What it does to set quality in practice: the first rep of a set where I've done this feels different from the first rep of a set where I walked up and just started moving. There's a precision to it. The target muscle engages earlier and more completely. The movement pattern is cleaner. The mind-muscle connection that coaches talk about — which sounds like soft language for something that's actually a real neuromuscular phenomenon — is stronger when the nervous system has been told what it's about to do.
I've taught this to people I've coached over the years. The resistance is always the same: it feels unnecessary, even slightly awkward, to stand still in front of a weight for fifteen seconds before picking it up. People feel self-conscious about it. They feel like they should just get going.
The ones who stick with it stop arguing for it after a few weeks. They notice the difference themselves.
The bigger point is this: your nervous system has been in a completely different mode from the moment you woke up until the moment you walked into your training session. Email, traffic, decisions, conversations — all of it demands a different kind of mental engagement than training does. Walking from one directly into the other without a transition is asking your nervous system to perform without warming up.
Two to three minutes of deliberate mental preparation before a session, followed by fifteen seconds of focus before each working set, is the transition. It's not the least important part of the session. I'd argue it's the most important part, because everything that follows depends on whether the mental state is actually there.
Franco knew this. At some level, the best of that generation knew this. It's been trained out of modern gym culture because it doesn't look like doing anything.
It is doing something. It's the thing that makes everything else work.