Sports Performance ... Mindfulness and MBCT

[seeker]

Hey, I am interested to share how mindfulness and MBCT can boost sports performance - to promote better tenacity for training, or better focus when the chips are down.

There a neat blog here: https://rezl.com/2020/09/01/mindfulness-to-level-up-your-performance/

It explains how being more mindful enables athletes to set aside previous mistakes and failure so that they can be fully focus on their current moment; and that increased mindfulness reduces “rumination” and boosts “emotional regulation” leading to an improvement in an athlete’s “Athletic coping skills inventory” (a set of traits which are shown to improve both training and performance). It goes on to demonstrate that mindful athletes are more likely to quickly get in to their "flow" state.

Finally it highlights an investigation where a set of twenty elite golfers were divided into an “intervention group” and a “control group”. The intervention group was guided though an MBCT foundation course. The researchers then worked regularly with the golfers (both the intervention group and the control group) to assess their performances over a season. The results were impressive: the golfers in the intervention group all enhanced their national ranking, while only two golfers in the control group did so. Wow! I believe that they made better shot and club decisions... and started doing so earlier in their rounds... as they got into the groove.

Have any of you guys seen an increase in your sport performance as a result of improving you mindfulness?

 

[will]

Will it help me score more goals for my Sunday team?

 

[alf]

Will it help me score more goals for my Sunday team?

I guess it will help you set aside earlier misses... and make better decisions. I find I can train harder and in races I can push on by simply noting when my body is asking to stop!

 

[alf]

I've been reading about how sports men and women can best avoid distraction and focus on just doing their thing.

Phil Mickelson “pulled off the impossible”, by winning the PGA Championship at 50 years of age, becoming the oldest player to win a major. Mickelson put the success down to his mindfulness practice - following previous problems with his focus: e.g. he would hit good shots and piece together good rounds, but he’d have a hard time stacking good rounds on top of one another or re-focusing when something took him out of the zone.

He says: “I’m making more and more progress just by trying to elongate my focus... I might try to elongate the time that I meditate. I’m trying to use my mind like a muscle and just expand it, because as I’ve gotten older, it’s been more difficult for me to maintain a sharp focus, a good visualization and see the shot.”

American sports psychologist Michael Gervais works with athletes in “high stakes, consequential environments.” There’s an interview here. Gervais helps athletes to be focussed in situations which may be very distracting (perhaps it’s the significance of the moment or even the noise of the crowd). The success of his clients demonstrates Gervais’s view that “awareness” might actually be a future pillar of elite sports performance (alongside nutrition, recovery, and strength and conditioning, which, Gervais, points out, were once viewed with cynicism, too). I will just highlight a few topics from Gervais’s interview:

Re Confidence: Confidence comes from one place and one place only: what you say to yourself. It’s not just built on past success. The good news is that ultimately, we are responsible for what we say to ourselves. It’s a trainable skill. So, by default, confidence is trainable, and it’s 100% under our control.

Re choking (self-doubt that causes athletes to over focus on technique that they have automated): Usually it’s about “The moment is big and I don’t feel I have the skills... so I feel small.. and I don’t have the skills to manage the moment.” So is the moment big? There’s really no such thing as a big moment in my mind. You’ve heard it your whole life: the Super Bowl is a big game. And I can create a narrative where that’s true. But when I strip it down, it’s no different. More people are watching. But the rules are the same. The balls are the same. The consequences are the same. One team wins, one team loses. The only person that changes the stakes is the person performing. The media makes it big, because they need eyeballs. That’s their business. As an athlete, we can say that a game is a game. So do you have the ability to be where your feet are? And are you going to change that because people are watching?”

On retaining focus at big moments: “Now it’s true...there are real changes that can happen after winning…. but really what it comes down to is how you respond to now. So that’s the mission here: figure out how to train your inner world—your mind —so that you can be exactly where your feet are in any environment, in any situation, in any circumstance. If you can do that, the outcomes will take care of themselves.”