Athletic
Performance:
You Can Reach Your Personal Best
Olympic athletes use self-hypnosis to help them achieve top performance. United States teams and those of other nations recognize that the power of mental rehearsal is equally as important as physical practice. Russian teams are taught mental conditioning from the onset of their training.
For the average person, hypnotherapy cannot turn a golfing duffer into an international champion. Factors, skills and abilities other than mental are involved. But hypnosis can be used to enable a player to achieve his or her personal best!
Time Magazine reported, in a cover story on the 1984 Olympics, that on the night before the finals in women’s gymnastics Mary Lou Retton, then age 16, lay in bed at Olympic Village mentally rehearsing her performance ritual. She had done the same on hundreds of previous nights, visualizing herself performing all her routines perfectly-imagining in her mind all the moves and rehearsing them again and again. The result, of course, was a performance of perfection, presented with charm, poise and confidence, culminating in a gold medal.
“What the mind can conceive the body can achieve!” Proof of that statement has been provided countless times. Mary Lou pictured a perfect performance in her mind. Her body produced it. The same capability is available to any sports enthusiast. If the skills and coordination abilities do not equal Olympic levels, they can still carry the player to heights of personal best, providing new levels of achievement and satisfaction.
To train the body to the limits of its capabilities without simultaneously training the mind is to invite, at best, mediocrity. Sports psychologists have claimed that for Olympic teams 80% of the athlete’s performance is in the mind. Championship players in virtually every form of competition have echoed this belief.
WHAT THE MIND CAN DO
Mental rehearsal, also termed mental imaging, can create and reaffirm the confidence necessary to achieve top performance. The picture visualized in the mind can convince the subconscious that achievement is possible. The autonomic nervous system performs in exactly the same manner followed during a physical rehearsal. Neuromuscular coordination improves. What your mind can conceive you can achieve. If you can think it, see it and feel it at this level in your mind, you can do it!
What can be accomplished through the powers of the mind? Perhaps most important is the development of positive attitudes. Negative thoughts pertaining to performance skills can be changed or eliminated. Enjoyment of the sport will be enhanced to a major degree as skills improve to the point where intermittent incidents of poor performance no longer arouse irritation, anger, discouragement or detrimental emotional reaction. Concentration, coordination, technique all can improve as well as awareness of proper form and posture.
Sports enthusiasts face the same stumbling blocks that people have to deal with in other areas of life - business, personal relationships, achievement of goals and ambitions. The biggest of all is fear, and fear comes in many forms. Fear of failure is always restrictive and is very common in sports, as is its hidden partner, fear of success - an apprehension that success can create the expectation (among others) of further improvement. Fear of humiliation can be strong. Many golfers experience near terror on the first tee where people may be watching the first drives. Competition can produce sensations of intimidation resulting in deterioration of skills.
Hypnosis, and properly learned and applied self-hypnosis, can work to reduce or eliminate the mental obstacles to peak performance in sports activities. This is an area the truth of the phrase “what the mind can conceive the body can achieve” becomes highly evident.
THE STEPS TO ACHIEVEMENT
The goal of hypnosis in its application is not the learning of basic skills, though the learning of basic skills can be greatly enhanced with hypnosis. The goal is to enable the athlete to achieve peak performance level, her or his personal best. As with virtually all hypnosis, the first step must be relaxation. Relaxation to a level appropriate for the implanting of hypnotic suggestion is not really resting. It is deep, and can be brought about through a Consulting Hypnotist. Or it can be learned from a teaching Hypnotist or even through study and practice using any of several excellent books and references.
Goal setting is essential. Without having an objective, it is pointless to begin a task, project or trip. Athletes, coaches or therapists or a combination thereof may set goals. It is important for goals to be specific, focused on the area in which improvement is desired; playing better tennis is not a valid goal. Improving a serve or backhand is a goal. Goals must be short term, achievable and step-by-step, so that both success and completion are expected.
Concentration is vitally important, and sometimes difficult to develop. Hypnosis has long been an effective means of improving concentration capabilities. Distractions must be eliminated. Post-hypnotic cues may prove useful in stimulating both concentration and specific skills. Mental imaging, not just in mental rehearsing, at the moment of performance can produce dramatic results.
Finally, mental rehearsal is the ultimate key to
superlative performance. It can
prove more productive than physical practice.
Imagery is not merely visual in nature; it can include all the senses.
In a diving competition, the form of the dive is visual; the smell of the
chlorine water is olfactory; the wetness of the entry is tactile, the cheers of
the crowd are auditory. Perfection
requires the use of all senses.
Wellness Hypno-Therapeutics, Green Bay/Oconto, WI
Call Now for an appointment or more information (920) 227-8186