Adopt a mindful approach to your workouts and you could enhance your sports performance.
As the trend for mindfulness expands into more areas of life, specific applications emerge, and fitness is no exception.
In the past, if you wanted to optimise your training sessions, improve your performance or reach your fitness goals, you may have employed traditional sports psychology techniques such as goal-setting, self-talk or visualisations of sailing past the finishing line. Or you may have looked into sport-specific cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), which takes the view that any negative thought or emotion must be banished from your mind if you are to perform at your best.
Recent studies suggest, however,
that some of these techniques are not always consistent in their results, and can even have an opposite effect from the one desired. By trying to eliminate negative thoughts, for example, you can inadvertently end up focusing on these states of mind, not just increasing their frequency but also distracting yourself from your performance. Hardly the result you’re aiming for! Instead, a better way to boost your sports performance can be to develop non-judgemental, present moment acceptance of your thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. In other words, mindfulness.
PERFORMANCE BOOST
Research backs up this view. The first study to look at mindfulness-based interventions for athletes was in 1985 and it found that, after a period of mindfulness training, a group of rowers performed way above their coach’s expectations, while several medal-winning Olympic rowers said the training had aided their performance. Fast-forward 20 years, and clinical psychologists Carol Glass and Keith Kaufman developed a programme to help fitness fans and athletes in their bid to meet their fitness goals. Called mindful sport performance enhancement (MSPE), the six-week course is adaptable to any sport, and uses many of the techniques in this book, including the raisin exercise (see p42), except that MSPE replaces the raisin with chocolate!), sitting meditations (increasing from 10-25 minutes over the duration of the course), breathing meditations, a body scan, mindful yoga, walking meditations and a sport-specific meditation, such as a running meditation. All these practices will help boost your sports performance, so turn to the relevant pages in this book to get your fitness back on track. Here are some more ways mindfulness can enhance your sporting experience.
EMBRACE FLEXIBILITY
Mindfulness is about acceptance, and this relates to your training as well as your performance. So when it comes to your weekly workouts, instead of having a rigid plan about what you should achieve, adopt a more flexible approach. It might just help you reach your goals quicker! For example, if you’re learning a yoga pose from a book or the internet, rather than tell yourself ‘I must point my head in this direction’ or ‘I have to raise my leg to this height’, say to yourself, ‘One way to point my head might be…’ This subtle difference – an approach
you could call mindful learning – has surprising effects, sports psychology research reveals. Participants taught to hit a ball with conditional language (‘Try hitting it this way’) rather than absolute language (‘You must hold the bat like this’), were able to adapt their moves successfully and use different body parts when the researchers secretly replaced the ball with a heavier one. Those participants who were given specific instructions were much less able to adapt their moves to respond to the heavier ball.
GET IN THE ZONE
Imagine you’re running a 10K. Your body feels balanced, your legs powerful and you’ve found your optimum pace – you
feel you could go on for ever, step by step, breath by breath, never tiring. Not a runner? Think of the last time you had a good swim. You’re in the pool and your body is working in perfect harmony as you glide effortlessly through the water as if it’s your natural habitat, breath co-ordinated and muscles poised in that sweet spot between tension and relaxation. There’s nowhere else you’d rather be. Peak-performance experiences, also
known as being in the zone, are associated with what sports psychologists refer to as states of flow – those times when you feel able to meet the challenges of the sporting situation you face. It’s actually a very mindful state – you’re so involved in what you’re doing, enjoying it so much that nothing else matters. Your mind and body are in harmony and you have no self-doubt. Some researchers would say this state leads to optimal sport performance. And there’s good evidence to show a strong connection between mindfulness and
states of flow in athletes. In fact, studies show that after mindfulness-based exercises, sports people have a significant increase in their ‘levels of flow’.
BEAT PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
Do you get anxious before a big event? Perhaps you’re taking on a cycling challenge and feel nervous about whether you’ve done sufficient training. Or maybe a touch of anxiety impacts on your enjoyment when you try a sport for the first time or have to stand at the front of a yoga class. MSPE has been shown to significantly
reduce sport-related anxiety and boost levels of sport-related optimism. What’s more, the benefits last! Twelve months after completing an MSPE workshop, participants in a 2011 trial were still experiencing the benefits, enjoying their sport more and reporting an increase in general satisfaction in their lives.
"Insteadofhaving
a rigidplan about what you should achieve with your weekly workouts,
adopt a more flexible
approach. It might just help you reach your goals quicker!"
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