Twenty minutes before you compete, your body starts doing things. Heart rate climbs. Hands get cold. Stomach drops. Most athletes read that as something is wrong with me and start fighting it.

It isn't wrong. That's your body moving blood to your muscles and sharpening your focus, because it thinks something important is about to happen. It's right. Something important is about to happen.

So the goal isn't to make it go away. It's to know what yours looks like, expect it, and have something to do with your hands while it passes.

Pick everything that happens to you. Be honest, because this is what the routine gets built around.

This decides where most of your routine goes. No point building a ten-minute warm-up block if the worst of it is at 1 a.m. the night before.

"Take a deep breath" is useless advice, and you already know it, because you've tried it in the tunnel and nothing happened.

Here's the part nobody tells you: breathing in speeds your heart up. Breathing out slows it down. So a big dramatic inhale actually makes it worse. What works is making the out-breath longer than the in-breath.

It takes about ninety seconds to feel it. Which is why it goes near the end of the routine, not the start.

This changes the wording of your routine so it sounds like your sport instead of a worksheet.

These are the ones that come up most in your sport. Pick any that sound like you.

The dead time. This is the hardest stretch and it's the one your routine has to fill exactly. Too long and you're standing there inventing things, too short and you rush it.

Some of these moves need privacy. If you're standing on a pool deck with forty people, the routine has to work standing up and silent.

Warm-ups are over. You're standing there. This is the stretch nobody coaches and it's where most of the damage happens, because an empty minute fills itself, usually with the last time this went badly, or a list of people watching.

The fix is boring: have the minute already spoken for. One decision and one word. That's all it needs to hold.

The decision is your first move: exactly what you do on the first point, the first question, the first stroke. Decide it now, when you're calm, so you're not deciding it then.

The word is one word. Not a sentence, not a pep talk. The same one every single time, so eventually hearing it starts the routine on its own.

Pick any that apply. These add specific pieces to your routine.

Decide both now, while nothing is at stake. That's the entire point of doing it here.

The routine handles before. This handles after: the part where you lie there at 2 a.m. running the same point back for the ninth time.

That loop isn't you being dramatic. It's your brain trying to extract a lesson so the thing doesn't happen again. The problem is it has no way of knowing when it's finished, so it just keeps going.

Fifteen minutes, three questions, on paper. It's in your routine card below, and the rule is you do it once, not again at midnight.