Meditation in sport
Practice, Practice, Practice…
Mindfulness is all the rage right now. Everyone is talking about it. Apparently everyone is doing it in one form or another. It is reported that the vast majority of ‘successful’ people, however you define that, have a mindfulness or meditation practice.
Top level athletes have mindfulness practices as well. We are more and more starting to realize how much of competing at a high level is mental. Athletes now put as much work into their heads as they do into their bodies.
The science is starting to support the practice. We are able to see and measure changes in the brain due to the effect of consistent mental practice.
If you are a run-of-the-mill amateur athlete why do you care?
You care because mental practice has always been in the repertoire of successful athletes. Meditation and mindfulness practices can not only help you compete but also help you deal with training and preparing.
First, I’m sure you are familiar with the practice of visualization. The most common practice is to visualize how you want your race to go. With visualization you can presage and burn-in the decisions and outcomes you’re looking for. It’s like a mental walk-through of the main event.
How does that work with a meditation practice? Visualization becomes much more effective when you have a mind that is receptive and prepared for it. This means that if you do your affirmations and visualizations right after you meditate they will stick better. Your mind is freshly tilled ground at this point and anything you put in there will flourish all the better because of it.
This is in all regards ‘mental practice’.
Even if it’s not a race you can use meditation to calm your mind so that you mind is receptive to anything you want to work on. Basically what you are trying to do is not so much focus your mind, but declutter it to make room for useful and effective thinking.
When you combine the physical effort of training with the mental clarity of mindfulness you can have breakthroughs on whatever thorny issues have been rattling around in your head. Who among us hasn’t had a light go off in the middle of a run where the answer comes to us and it all becomes so clear? Who among us hasn’t gone for a run angry and felt that tension resolve itself? It is the synergy of the mind-body connection that allows us to leverage this mental practice.
There is some science that you can use mindfulness to influence physical aspects of your body as well. You can visualize your muscles contracting, your heart pumping, or (my favorite) your mitochondria burning fat! Visualize the healing or the fat burning or whatever process you want to happen in your body. With mindfulness you can get better at practicing mind over matter.
For you competitive athletes who want to squeeze better performance and better results out of you races mindfulness can help. By practicing mindfulness you will prepare your mind to deal with challenges. Through practice you can train your mind to not have negative thoughts and race-performance-anxiety. You can mitigate the mental stresses of performance which for many runners are worse than the physical stress of the event.
A good mental practice will allow you to transcend the discomfort of the race. You will be able to bear more discomfort longer. If you’re a marathoner you know what I mean. IT will also make you less likely to panic when something goes sideways in an event. It can eliminate those stress triggers, allow you to stay in a good place and roll with the changes.
It has been shown that consistent meditation reduces stress. That’s a great thing for athletes because stress physically manifests as inflammation in the body. That’s right, by reducing or eliminating stress you will allow your body to heal faster and get better performances out of your training.
Meditation has also been shown to help with your sleep. If you have trouble falling asleep or getting your mind to quiet down so you can get good rest meditation can fix that. The same mind-calming techniques used in meditation can be used to clear your mind and let you sleep. Better sleep means better recovery and better training.
Mindfulness could be your secret weapon. It helps with fear and stress. It helps you deal with pain and suffer better and longer. It improves your sleep patterns. It can help you train better, recover faster and race better. It can make you calmer and happier in your life. It makes you more flexible to changes and challenges.
To top it all off it helps you find the ‘zone’. A peaceful mind is more open to slipping into that wonderful place where your mind goes quiet and you transcend the workout or race. Time slows down and the effort dissolves into a sort of performance euphoria.
Great! Sounds good! I’ll take 2! Wait. What’s the catch?
The catch is the same as with every other practice. If you want to reap the benefits of mindfulness you have to practice it. Like any other training it takes some consistency of practice to be effective.
This means setting aside 5, 10 or 20 minutes to practice mindfulness in your day. There are plenty of YouTube videos and audios and apps you can use to guide you if you need help.
Regardless of the coaching you get the practice itself is very simple. You sit comfortably. You slowly scan your body with your mind becoming aware of the present, the now. You then focus on your breathing, or more specifically your breath in your body.
When you do this your monkey-mind will kick into full gear and start throwing thoughts at you a mile a minute. It’s ok. Everyone’s mind does this. You simply acknowledge the thought, put it aside and return your focus to the breath in the body.
That’s it. It’s simple. But, it takes practice.
Now you can transfer this practice to your workouts. As you are running simply scan your body. One bit at a time feel how your body feels right now. Then become aware of your heart beat in your body. Then become aware of your breath in your body. Just stay with the breath and let your mind calm. Let the mental chatter fall away and run with your breath.
If it’s a hard workout or a race you can become an observer of yourself. In your mind step outside of yourself and dispassionately observe what is going on. Move from being the doer to the observer.
Whenever you feel any negative thoughts or feeling or other patterns coming on just let them go like you would any other chatter. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. Refocus on the breath and smile. Practice being grateful for whatever it is that your workout is giving you. Accept the gift.
Practicing mindfulness in whatever form is appropriate to you is a great tool to help you train, compete and just to help you live happier in general. What we tightly-wrapped, competitive types struggle with is that this practice is not results focused. There is no way to win at mindfulness. It is a practice that will surprise you by showing up when you need it.
There is a wonderful opportunity for the athlete to use mindfulness to enhance mind-body connection and the understanding of your machine. It is not a sharp tool but it is a powerful tool that expresses itself by manifesting benefits over time.
Why not experiment for 30 days with making mindfulness part of your practice?