Athletes - particularly gymnasts - are inevitably confronted with pressure during competitions. To ensure that athletes can perform their tasks despite experiencing pressure, it is essential to safely expose them to competition-like experiences during training. Therefore, we collaborated with two gymnastics coaches in developing a pressure protocol for elite-level youth gymnasts (n = 16) to assess whether psychological states that are typically experienced during competitions can be evoked during training. Our results show that cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and mental effort were increased significantly, while self-confidence and performance indicated declines, albeit not significant, when training with a pressure protocol compared to regular training. Furthermore, none of these variables differed between the pressure training and competition. The current results inspire confidence that coaches may utilize pressure protocols to successfully introduce competition-like psychological states during training to help athletes perform better despite experiencing pressure and anxiety.
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