Sports Therapy

Improving Your Athletic Performance

In a cover story on the 1984 Olympics, Time magazine reported:

The night before the finals in women's gymnastics last week, Mary Lou Retton, 16, lay in bed at the Olympic Village, conjuring. It was an established ritual for her, no different from the imaginings of a hundred other nights. "I see myself hitting all my routines, doing everything perfectly," says Retton. "I imagine all the moves and go through them with the image in my mind."

We know that gold-medal winner Retton executed an astonishing performance, notable not only for its mastery of skills involved, but for its equally impressive grace, confidence, and charm. Retton was truly a star.

As you participate in a sport, you may work very hard at training your body. You push it, put it through its paces, and work for hours to polish the finer points of your game or manoeuvre. However, all this hard work may not train your mind to be athletic. One sports psychologist for a u.s. Olympic team says that 80 to 90 percent of an Olympic athlete's performance is in the mind. This involves using your imagination, your thought processes, and your attitudes to provide incentive, support, reinforcement, and refinement of your physical skills. It involves visualizing, just as Mary Lou Retton did.

Specifically, you can use visualization to do the following:

Increase your agility

Improve your coordination

Improve your concentration

Refine your technique

Heighten your awareness of body position

Eliminate inhibiting thoughts in regard to your performance

Increase your capacity for enjoying the sport

In Sports Psyching, Thomas Tutko and Umberto Tosi discuss "Mental Rehearsal." They counsel the athlete to mentally rehearse the play, making it correct in all details so it will be a successful execution of the person's best effort.

Visualization, or mental rehearsal, is effective because of the fact that as you imagine an activity your neurons fire in exactly the same patterns they would follow if you were actually performing the activity. It is believed that these movements, along with contractions in your muscles, are responsible for improved neuromuscular coordination.

Along with the physical realization you gain by frequently executing your stroke, dive, shot, pass, or routine until you feel the sureness of it, you also realize an emotional affirmation. As you see the pictures in your mind, your subconscious is convinced that the desired feat is possible. When you experience the total success of your movement, you also feel the accompanying pleasure.

By stating your goal and then seeing it through, over and over again, you are affirming your own positive behaviour. If you say, "I will be the fastest runner in the marathon," "I will score with every free throw," or "I will get my highest score in the play-off match on Saturday," your statements back you up and give you added power. If you can think it, see it, and say it-you can do it.

Obstacles to Reaching Your Goal

Now let's take a look at the roadblocks that make it more difficult or impossible to reach your goal. Almost always, the obstacles are conditions that cause anxiety. Some of the most common are:

Fear of failing

Fear of being humiliated

Fear of competition

Feelings of intimidation

The mere thought of failing or looking foolish can trigger fear. The fear of being humiliated in front of a crowd or other players can cause you to tighten your muscles, change your breathing, and feel exceptionally tense or even ill. The fear of competition can have the same effects. You may experience a lack of concentration, an unfocused feeling-both mentally and physically. Your vision may blur, or you may get weak knees. Further, being intimidated by "better" players can lead to feelings of personal inadequacy and repressed anger. If you allow yourself to be intimidated, you may hold back from playing the best game you can play. You may not see yourself as being able to challenge such a fine opponent. As a simple illustration, assume that you learn- ed to play tennis from a group of friends who are good players, some of them champions in local tournaments. As you improve your game, you do not realize that you are closing the gap between them and you. Instead, you still see yourself as a clumsy beginning player who has no skill and operates mainly by luck. Because you don't assert yourself and challenge the other players, they do not see you as an equal and continue to treat you as a less competent novice.

Eliminating the Obstacles

Regardless of the condition or circumstance that restricts you from per- forming at your peak, you can work to eliminate the obstacle through your hypnotic induction.

Working on Your Attitude

In addition to the conditions already discussed, other attitudinal problems can serve as impediments to your athletic performance. The most common of these are:

Inappropriate aggression

lack of confidence

lack of concentration

lack of assertiveness

The hypnotic suggestion which works on these particular problems follows:

  Ridding Yourself of Physical Symptoms

Still other problems are ones of a physical nature, such as:

Shortness of breath

Blurred vision

Muscle fatigue

Weak knees

Tension

"Butterflies"