How mental exercise can help athletes.

The mind and body are linked in the same way different parts of a computer are linked. Your mind tells your body what movements to make and your body tells your mind what it is seeing, feeling etc. and most of this is happening subconsciously.

The mind is the most advanced computer in the world and it can help your body achieve amazing things. It can help show the body how to make a rocket that goes into space but for the purpose of sporting excellence and achievement, it can help you be the best you can possibly be. Just how good is this? Who knows! You will have to answer that one yourself. Hypnosis is a proven method used by even the American Olympic team to improve results.

1. Goal setting:- Achievement and performance goals
2. Mental Imagery:- How it is going to be when I achieve those states and goals.
3. Mental flow:- Getting your mind into the zone of no effort.
4. Habit patterns:- Developing new empowering beliefs and habits.

Goal setting does not just involve setting goals within the sporting arena. It also involves setting goals in life. It may be that solving relationship or personal difficulties is a priority. What’s the point of asking an athlete to focus on winning a game is their marriage is having difficulties or they are about to be declared bankrupt? You cannot take sport or any other area of life in isolation. This is common sense for the professional coach.

It is important to have short-term achievable goals in sport so that you can work towards them as a reality. Some say long-term outcomes are not as favourable as they can lead to disappointment.

You can rest assured that the vast majority of highly successful people who win goal medals, championship trophy’s etc have all done it a thousand times in their minds and in their dreams before ever doing it in reality.

The truth in sport psychology and hypnosis is we don’t develop strategies from scratch and then teach them to athletes. The truth is that we look to what truly successful sports stars are doing anyway, positive mental imagery is a form of self-hypnosis. It is possible to look at any sporting great from the past and write an entire book on applied sporting techniques based on what they did naturally. Mental edge is the difference between great and the truly great. This is not a new invention, and has been used in all areas of sport from Jack Nicholas in golf to Andre Agassi in tennis. Nicholas said he played more golf in his armchair at home than he did on the course, and Agassi employed Anthony Robbins and hypnosis to bring consistency into his game.

Mental imagery involves seeing and experiencing success in you mind. You don’t have to see it – some people are much better at feeling things. Imagine how it fees to run your fastest time ever! Imagine how it feels to have that medal placed around you neck!

Affirmations are useful at times, but to truly change your internal belief system it is necessary to make use of mental imagery and rehearsal. It improves your vision and your focus. You can think of someone who makes you angry and without them being in the room you can indeed feel the sensations of anger. In the same way if you rehearse success in your mind, you will start to feel successful.

This is your way forward.

Long-term outcomes, i.e. mentally rehearsing the winning of a match or a peak performance, can be risky only if you work to a success / failure model. Imagine if you could never fail- NO FAILURE, ONLY FEEDBACK.

This means you can mentally prepare to win a match, or score a heap of goals, and if it doesn’t happen how you imagined, well then you haven’t failed you simply have feedback and information for what to do next time.

No failure – only feedback.

Nothing to fear but fear itself.

If you use mental imagery and rehearsal in your preparation and coaching, you are more likely to achieve positive personal development and performance management as well as motivation, self-confidence, self-esteem and a new and more powerful belief system. Experiments conducted recently at Harvard Medical Collage have proven beyond doubt that the brain is neuro-plastic, it continues to grow and develop as we learn and perfect new skills. They tested participants for neural activity in the frontal cortex of the brain before and after the experiment. Practicing a five finger piece on a piano for one hour per day over five days the found new neural growth in the brain. Testing a second group who only imagined playing this five finger exercise over the same period of time, they found this also increased neural growth in the same way. The subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between a real of imagined experience. If we continually imagine a successful outcome, the mind begins to believe in it and moves us towards it. When we see a slump in performance it is usually associated with negative expectations and visualisations. Holding a failure in the mind instead of learning from it and leaving it in the past. The mind is very good at attracting into our life what we are holding in our mind.

Mental flow involves being “in the zone”, being engrossed in an event to an almost spiritual level. This is when you switch over to the automatic pilot of the subconscious. Knowing you were going to score before you even made contact with the ball, a feeling of being invincible as if this is your day and nothing could possibly go wrong. This state of performance is sometimes known as a peak experience where there are no negative thoughts of possible failure or frustrations to get in the way, only positive expectations.

Flow involves positive state management. In other words, getting into that championship state more often and just when you need to.

Habit patterns of the mind. The new neural growth in the brain is the development of new habits of thoughts and new beliefs. It usually takes four to six weeks to condition the mind and make these new habit patterns permanent. Repetition is the mother of skill and habits are developed though repetition. A negative frame of mind is also repetition formed habit that needs to be changed.