They call it the "Zone" … a mystical, transcendental state - a state of "flow", the complete merging of action and awareness that occurs when an athlete achieves peak performance.

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Sometimes - very rarely - it just "happens". At other times, athletes strive to enter the Zone. All too often, they strive too hard.
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 Modern training techniques focus on helping the athlete to master "the inner game" - to develop that cool synchrony of mind, body, and emotion that will allow him or her to enter the Zone at will.
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 One of the key factors in eliciting peak athletic performance is the manipulation and optimization of the athlete's stress level.

There is a direct relationship between stress (defined as a state of high arousal) and athletic performance. This is known as the "Inverted-U" hypothesis, or the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law is almost axiomatic in psychology. Put simply, it states that increased arousal produces improvement in performance up to a specific optimal point - the Zone - thereafter increased arousal produces a fall-off in performance.

It can be applied to almost any task or activity, but the optimal arousal level varies for different tasks and different individuals.

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Tasks requiring subtle motor skills (playing golf, tennis, or a musical instrument, ballet dancing) are optimally performed with low arousal levels, while tasks requiring gross motor skills (weightlifting, rowing, boxing) are optimally performed with higher arousal levels.
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 Highly skilled athletes tend to require moderately high arousal levels for optimal performance, while less skilled athletes function best on relatively low arousal levels.

At a certain optimal level of arousal, the athlete has to "back off". At this point relaxation techniques become critically important in bringing the athlete into the Zone. Recent research has discovered the specific biochemistry of the Zone, and highlights the importance of relaxation as the key to peak performance.