Most advice on how to get in the zone for sports covers the whole game: sleep, food, visualising the win. None of it is much use when you're standing over a four-foot putt with your hands shaking. The zone gets won or lost in single moments. The tee box. The toss before a second serve. The first hold on a route you've fallen off twice. The 20 seconds on the mat before the ref says go.
Sports psychologists have studied those 20 seconds for decades, and what they keep finding is that the athletes who lock in do the same small things in the same order every time. A routine short enough to run anywhere can copy them, with one spray of Dragon Breath as the part your body remembers.
What "the zone" means to the people who study it
The word researchers use is flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined it in the early 1970s after interviewing climbers, chess players and surgeons who described losing track of time while doing something hard. In 1999 he and sport psychologist Susan Jackson published Flow in Sports, the first book written only about flow in athletes. Athletes in their interviews kept describing attention narrowed to the task and no voice in the head commenting on it.
You can't force flow, so learning how to be in the zone for sports means setting up the conditions for it. The most studied one is a pre-performance routine.
Your pre game routine matters more than how long it takes
In 2008 Chris Lonsdale and Jimmy Tam filmed 284 free throws from 14 NBA playoff games and coded every bounce, breath and glance before each shot. How long the routine took made no difference to whether the ball went in. Sticking to it did. When players ran their usual sequence they made 83.77% of their free throws. When they broke it, that fell to 71.43%.
Rafael Nadal lines his water bottles up by his chair with the labels facing the court. In his 2011 autobiography Rafa he wrote that it's "a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head." Michaéla Schippers at Erasmus University and Paul Van Lange at the Free University Amsterdam studied athletes' rituals and found players reported less tension when they kept them.
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How to get in the zone for sports in under a minute
Build the routine around one moment you repeat: a serve, a tee shot, a start, a hold. Run it the same way in practice as in competition, or it won't be there when you need it.
- Step back from the spot. Take one slow breath in through the nose and a longer breath out.
- One spray of Dragon Breath. Let it run for its 10 seconds while you look at nothing in particular.
- Say your cue word, out loud or in your head.
- Step in and fix your eyes on one small target. Hold it.
- Go.
Pick one cue word
A 2011 meta-analysis by Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis and Yiannis Theodorakis at the University of Thessaly pooled 32 studies of self-talk in sport. Short instructional cues ("smooth", "through the ball", "hips") came out ahead for fine skills like putting and serving. Motivational cues ("come on", "fight") did better for strength and endurance. For locking in before a single precise action, pick the instructional kind and keep it to one or two words.
Hold your eyes still on one spot
Joan Vickers at the University of Calgary first described what she called the quiet eye in 1987: the last steady fixation on a target before a movement starts. In her basketball work, elite shooters held that final look for 972 milliseconds. Sub-elite shooters held it for 357. A golfer picks a dimple on the back of the ball. A climber fixes on the next hold before reaching.
Why put a taste in the routine?
Breathing and cue words live in your head, which is the part that gets noisy under pressure. A strong physical sensation is harder to ignore. It gives you a hard line between the warm-up chatter and the moment you step in.
One spray of Dragon Breath gives you about 10 seconds of a bright, electric buzz across the tongue and mouth. The taste is earthy and a little peppery for a second, then the tingle takes over and the mouth floods with saliva. People come out the other side of it switched on and present, with a clean, fresh feeling that lingers. "Oh wow, the saliva flow," was the first thing one customer said after a single spray, on camera. Another, in a reaction video moments after one spray, said, "Definitely energized."
The spray is chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a root from Central Mexico that grows in the Sierra Gorda, where it's called raíz de oro, golden root. The tingle comes from affinin, which measures 6.9 to 8.5 mg per gram of root. Cilia-López and colleagues recorded it in Mexico as a spice and as a root soaked in alcohol and rubbed on sore muscles. Mara's root is wild-harvested from growth zones the Mara team selects with the help of local elders, then dual-extracted. There's more on the plant in our guide to chilcuague.
A spray suits sport for plain practical reasons. The bottle sits in a gym bag, a golf bag pocket or the zip pocket of a chalk bag, and a few sprays is all it takes. The extract stays sealed in Miron violet glass, away from air and light, so it tastes the same in month three as on day one. With 250+ sprays per bottle, one lasts a long season of tee boxes.
Dragon Breath – Chilcuague Extract
50 ml mouth spray. Wild-harvested chilcuague root, dual-extracted. 250+ sprays.
Add to bagWhere it goes, sport by sport
Golf. Spray as you pull the club from the bag, then do your practice swing while the buzz runs. By the time it fades you're over the ball.
Tennis and padel. Keep the bottle in the bag by your chair. One spray at the changeover, before the first serve of the next game.
Climbing. Spray while you chalk up at the base of the route and read the first three moves. Then tie in.
Jiu-jitsu and wrestling. One spray when your name is called, on the walk to the mat. Shake out your hands while it runs.
Running and swimming. In the call room or behind the blocks, a minute before the start.
Try it in training first. For how people use it before lifting, see our post on natural pre-workout alternatives.
Dragon Breath considerations
If you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it.
Questions people ask
How do you get in the zone for a game?
Pick the one moment you repeat most (a serve, a shot, a start) and build a short routine around it: a breath, a cue word, a fixed point for your eyes. Run it the same way every time, in practice and in competition.
How long should a pre-performance routine be?
In Lonsdale and Tam's 2008 study of NBA free throws, the length of the routine made no difference to accuracy. Doing it the same way each time did, with 83.77% made when players kept their usual sequence.
What is a good cue word for sports?
One or two words about the movement itself, like "smooth" or "through". The University of Thessaly meta-analysis found instructional cues did best for fine skills.
How many sprays of Dragon Breath before a game?
Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, people go up to five.
