Stop overthinking, calm your body, and compete free under pressure.
Colorado Springs · Virtual sessions nationwide.
Stop overthinking, calm your body, and compete free under pressure.
Colorado Springs · Virtual sessions nationwide.
You've put in the work. The fitness is there. Your coaches see the potential. But something keeps getting between your ability and your performance — and it's not what most people think.
Maybe it's the overthinking that won't shut off — the racing thoughts, the second-guessing, the voice that's quiet all week and gets loud right when you need silence. Maybe it's the way your body hijacks you under pressure: shaking legs, tight chest, a heart rate that spikes before you're ready. Maybe it's the perfectionism that turned your sport into a pass/fail test — where one mistake spirals into a total unraveling.
Maybe you've lost the joy. The sport you used to love now feels like something you survive. Or maybe it's simpler than all of that: you're a different athlete in practice than you are in competition, and you don't fully understand why.
Whatever the pattern, it's not random. It's not a character flaw. And it's not going to get better by training harder or trying to be tougher. It's your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do under pressure — and it's far more common than anyone in your locker room is talking about.
You've tried the breathing exercises that work on the couch and collapse at the starting line. You've tried visualization that felt powerful in your bedroom and vanished under the lights. You've been told to "just be confident" and "stop overthinking" — advice that made things worse because now you're anxious about not being able to stop being anxious.
Maybe you white-knuckled it. Trained harder. Told yourself next time would be different. Or maybe you had therapy that helped you feel better on Monday but didn't give you a single thing to use mid-game on Saturday.
None of that failed because you weren't committed. It failed because it was aimed at the wrong system. You can't think your way out of a nervous system response — and most mental performance advice assumes that if you just think differently, you'll perform differently. That's like telling someone with a broken thermostat to just want the room to be cooler.
What athletes actually need is work that targets the body, not just the mind. Sport-specific training that reaches your autonomic nervous system directly — the system that's actually running the show when pressure hits and your prefrontal cortex starts going offline. That's a fundamentally different approach.
We start by mapping what's actually driving your performance barriers. For some athletes it's a nervous system that fires too hot under pressure. For others it's avoidance, past experiences, perfectionism, or competing for reasons that generate pressure instead of fuel. The intake process identifies your specific profile so we're never working on the wrong thing.
You leave every session with tools you can use — not theory to think about, but skills to practice. Drawing from HeartMath biofeedback, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), EMDR, and evidence-based sport psychology, we build a personalized system around how your autonomic nervous system specifically responds to pressure.
The goal isn't a perfect mental state on race day. It's a set of tools practiced enough to be automatic — so you can perform well regardless of what state you're in. Nervous, doubtful, distracted, imperfect. Competition anxiety , the nervest, doubt, and noise can show up and you perform anyway. That's trainable. That's what we build toward.
I'm a licensed sport psychologist with 15 years of experience helping athletes get out of their own heads and back into their sport — calm, confident, and competing free. Based in Colorado Springs, I work with athletes in person across the Pikes Peak region and virtually with athletes and teams nationwide.
I've worked alongside hundreds of athletes — from high school competitors to NCAA programs to professional performers — through the process of transforming overthinking, self-doubt, perfectionism, and pressure from things they fight into things they can work with.
I know this from the inside, too. I was a competitive swimmer before becoming an endurance athlete, and I've stood at starting lines with everything I'm describing running through my own head. That shapes how I work — not with the assumption that what you're feeling is a weakness to eliminate, but with the understanding that it's a signal to work with.
My approach integrates clinical rigor with practical sport psychology tools. I'm trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), EMDR, and HeartMath biofeedback — not because they're trendy, but because they reach where generic mental skills training doesn't. For athletes dealing with perfectionism, trauma, or deeper performance barriers, that clinical depth matters.
Physiological tools to regulate your nervous system in real time: breathwork, biofeedback-trained coherence states, and pre-competition protocols that hold when your heart rate is already climbing. Athletes consistently describe this as the most significant shift — the moment the pressure stops running the show.
Sport psychology mental routines that transfer from practice to competition. When the distractions and "what-ifs" arrive, you have a system to return to instead of fighting yourself for attention at the worst possible moment.
A shift from outcome-based confidence ("I'm good because I won") to process-based confidence ("I trust my tools and my training"). This is where perfectionism loses its grip — and where competing starts feeling sustainable instead of exhausting.
For athletes dealing with deeper patterns — perfectionism, past failures that left a mark, trauma, or a performance environment doing lasting damage — clinical sport psychology in Colorado Springs goes further than surface-level mental skills work. Both performance coaching and clinical services are available here.
You're capable. The question is whether your mental performance reflects that — consistently, under pressure, when it counts. Whether you're dealing with perfectionism, burnout, fear of failure, overthinking, or competition anxiety, there's a path that doesn't require you to simply push through.
Mental performance coaching is available nationally via virtual sessions. Clinical sport psychology — including therapy for anxiety, trauma, and eating concerns — is available to Colorado residents, in person in Colorado Springs and virtually statewide.
Culture drives performance more than most coaches have tools to address. Team consulting builds the psychological safety, trust, and collective resilience that shows up as late-game composure, post-mistake recovery, and an environment where athletes give their best.
Available in Colorado Springs and nationally.
Parents have more influence on athlete confidence than almost any other factor — and almost no guidance on how to use it well. Parent coaching helps families support without pressuring and keep joy at the center of sport even when stakes are high.
Your mental game has a shape. This shows you what it is. The Mental Performance Profile scores you across nine skills, maps your full picture, and pinpoints exactly where you'll gain the most ground — in five minutes, free.
The patterns that hold you back — the overthinking, the tightness, the spiraling, the lost joy — don't stay the same when left alone. They train themselves deeper into your competition experience. Your nervous system learns to fire that way. The avoidance patterns become more automatic. And the gap between who you are in practice and who you are under pressure becomes the story you tell yourself about who you are as an athlete.
You don't have to stay in that cycle. The skills that let athletes compete free — truly free, from the nervous system up — are trainable, measurable, and unlike physical fitness, they don't take years to develop. Athletes routinely notice meaningful shifts within the first few weeks of the right work: less hijacking, faster recovery from mistakes, a calmer body under pressure, and the return of something most of them forgot they were missing — the joy.
This could be that season.
Please reach us at trentclaypool@proton.me if you cannot find an answer to your question.
Absolutely — perfectionism and burnout are two of the most common reasons athletes come to Summit. Both are patterns your nervous system has learned over time, and both respond well to targeted work. Perfectionism often looks like an inability to let go of mistakes, a feeling that nothing is ever good enough, or turning every competition into a high-stakes test of your worth. Burnout looks like the slow disappearance of joy — where the sport you loved starts feeling like obligation. We use ACT, biofeedback, and EMDR to work with both from the body up, not just the mind. Many athletes dealing with perfectionism and burnout see meaningful shifts within the first month.
The practice-to-competition gap is one of the most common patterns I work with, and it's almost never a skill issue. It's a state issue. Your nervous system responds differently under competitive pressure than it does in training — and that difference changes everything from motor control to decision speed to confidence. The good news is that this is highly trainable. We use biofeedback, nervous system regulation training, and sport-specific mental routines to teach your body that competition is a challenge, not a threat. When that shift happens, the "real you" starts showing up on game day.
Most mental skills approaches rely on techniques that work in calm settings — visualization, positive self-talk, breathing exercises — but collapse under real competitive pressure. That's not because those tools are useless. It's because they're aimed at the thinking brain, and under pressure, the thinking brain goes offline. Your autonomic nervous system takes over. Our approach starts there — with the nervous system — using biofeedback, EMDR, and ACT to create change at the level that actually runs the show during competition. That's why athletes who've tried everything else often describe this as the first thing that actually transferred to game day.
A sport psychologist helps athletes understand what's actually driving their anxiety — whether that's nervous system dysregulation, avoidance patterns, perfectionism, or something deeper — and builds a personalized set of tools to address it. Unlike generic mental wellness advice, sport psychology is designed specifically for the conditions of competition: physiological activation, high stakes, performance on demand. Sessions combine mental skills training, nervous system regulation, and — when needed — clinical approaches like ACT or EMDR.
Most athletes notice meaningful shifts in autonomic nervous system regulation — less physiological hijacking, faster recovery from mistakes — within the first three to five sessions. Building a robust, automatic system that holds up consistently under pressure typically takes three to six months of regular work. The timeline depends on what we're addressing and how consistently you practice between sessions.
Yes — youth athletes often see some of the fastest changes because their patterns aren't as deeply established yet. I work with athletes as young as 10. Parent involvement is encouraged for athletes under 18, and parent coaching is available separately for families who want to support the work at home.
For therapy clients in Colorado, Dr. Claypool is in-network with Aetna and Select Health Colorado. Many clients use Thrizer to manage out-of-network reimbursement. Mental performance coaching — available to athletes nationally — is not covered by insurance. Full fee information is shared on the free discovery call.
Our fees vary depending on the type of therapy and the duration of the session. Dr. Claypool's fees are $250 for the intake session and $200 for each follow up session. In addition, we feel passionate about keeping our services available and reserve a limited number of spots at a sliding scale fee (income dependent). If you feel you may qualify for our sliding scale please inquire about availibility.
No. I work with athletes from every level — recreational to professional. Competition anxiety and performance anxiety affect athletes at all levels, and the tools that help are the same regardless of whether you're competing in a local 5K or an NCAA championship.
Not at all. Many athletes I work with have no clinical diagnosis — they're high-functioning competitors who simply haven't had access to sport-specific mental tools. Sport psychology spans clinical work (therapy for anxiety, trauma, eating concerns) and performance work (mental skills, nervous system training, pre-competition systems). You don't need to be struggling to benefit.
Absolutely! We have found that when the athlete's support system is onboard and engaged outcomes improve, especially for our younger athletes. We love seeing parents and coaches involved and the value they bring to their athlete's life!
While We specialize in the clinical and performance needs of athletes, we also have an extensive history in treating many mental health concerns - most notably, the impacts of stress, eating disorders, depression, and anxiety. One of the benefits of working with a clinical sport psychologist is the ability to not only help you get back to your baseline, but to truly thrive! We recommend taking your free discovery call to see how our services could be of benefit to you!
Yes, we do! We really enjoy working with teams. Typically, we start the process with discussing goals with the coach and developing a program for the team from there. We also support teams with both online and in-person learning and experiences.
The athletes who compete free aren't the ones without nerves, doubt, or pressure. They're the ones who built a different relationship to all of it — tools that work, a system they trust, and the practiced ability to act from their best self regardless of how their nervous system is behaving.
That's what sport psychology builds. That's what we work toward here, in Colorado Springs and with athletes across the country.
Contact: 719-428-1200 trentclaypool@proton.me Colorado Springs, CO — serving athletes in Monument, Colorado Springs, Castle Rock, Denver, and virtually nationwide.
Copyright © 2026 Dr. Trent Claypool - All Rights Reserved. Online sport psychology coaching programs are not a substitute for therapy.
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Weekly, science-backed strategies to get out of your own head, perform under pressure, and build the mental systems that let athletes compete free.