Hypnotherapy for Sports Performance
" You need the game, you need the heart, and you need the mind."
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There are three factors that influence our sporting ability; our fitness, our technical skills and our mental skills. Although many sports performers will spend a lot of their time on their fitness and technical skills, the mental side of the game is often neglected.
And yet it is amazing how good we can be at using our minds to work against us.
Even before we start an activity, we can can often find a number of reasons for failure - doubt, bad weather, lack of practice, tiredness, anxiety, stress - and find ourselves living up (or 'down') to our expectations.
Essentially, we can find ourselves performing badly because we are not using our minds in a positive way. As a result, we can form limiting beliefs about ourselves which leave us expecting failure rather than success.
By changing how we use our minds when we approach a game - by enhancing
self-belief, dealing with how we respond to committing errors, setting goals and maintaining a positive attitude,
it is possible to make a significant impact on our performance levels.
For golfers, one of the world's foremost peak performance experts is Dr Bob Rotella
whose series of golf psychology books are well known to any golfer who is wanting to improve their mental strengths.
In tennis,mastery of the mind is the crucial factor that tips the balance in favour of the winner. For, as Pete Sampras used to say:
"You need the game, You need the heart, and you need the mind"
Sports and golf psychology expert, Dr. Patrick J. Cohn, teaches athletes, coaches and parents mental game strategies to develop a championship mindset.
Peak Performance Sports helps to improve mental toughness for any athlete – amateur and professional – at any level.
The perspective of a sport psychologist is to facilitate a performance environment which includes an athlete’s training programme and lifestyle, enabling them to focus 100% on competition performance. This could involve discussing every aspects of an athlete’s life and relationships which contribute to improving performance and supporting them to change the areas that are limiting the athlete in reaching their goals.
It will almost certainly involve teaching them a variety of so-called mental skills.
Read Self Confidence in Sports
Imagery is the process by which you can create, modify or strengthen pathways important to the co-ordination of your muscles, by training purely within your mind. Imagination is the driving force of imagery.
Imagery rests on the important principle that you can exercise these parts of your brain with inputs from your imagination rather that from your senses: the parts of the brain that you train with imagery experience imagined and real inputs similarly, with the real inputs being merely more vividly experienced.
The real power of imagery lies in a number of much more sophisticated points:
- Imagery allows you to practise and prepare for events and eventualities you can never expect to train for in reality. With practice it allows you to enter a situation you have never physically experienced with the feeling that you have been there before and achieved whatever you are trying to achieve.
- Similarly, imagery allows you to prepare and practise your response to physical and psychological problems that do not occur normally, so that if they occur, you can respond to them competently and confidently. Imagery can be used to train in sports psychology skills such as stress and distraction management.
- It allows you to pre-experience the achievement of goals. This helps to give you confidence that these goals can be achieved, and so allows you to increase your abilities to levels you might not otherwise have reached.
- Practicing with imagery helps you to slow down complex skills so that you can isolate and feel the correct component movements of the skills, and isolate where problems in technique lie.
