How Meditation Improves Sport Performance
You’ve probably heard a lot of vague benefits about meditation, like how it calms you down. You might have seen pro athletes you admire talk about how much meditation has helped them.
What’s lost in all of this is the concrete connection between what meditation does and how it improves your performance in sports.
There are many ways to meditate, so what am I talking about, exactly, in this article?
The meditation I’ll be alluding to is mindfulness based where you focus on the senses, in some way. You might be sitting, lying down, or even walking.
Here are the basics of a common meditation practice:
You’re in a relaxed state
You’re focusing on one or more of your senses
When you become distracted and think about something else, you recognize it as normal and simply come back to focusing on one of your senses
The Process of Meditation
Let’s use the sense of hearing as an example.
In a 5 minute meditation, you’re sat upright with eyes closed processing every sound you hear.
Eventually, you start thinking about something random, like responsibilities for later, or what show you’re excited to watch.
You notice your thoughts being swept away by distractions, and you eventually “wake up” from this dreamlike state and come back to the present moment by refocusing on every sound you can hear.
Whether it’s 5 seconds or a whole minute later, you become distracted again. Instead of being frustrated with your distractible mind, you repeat the process. This will happen over and over again - it doesn’t mean you’re bad at meditation! Instead, this is what trains your brain for performance.
Time to connect the process described above to performance enhancement.
How Meditation Improves Your Mental Game: Refocus Training
Refocus training is a core tenet of sport psychology training. The ability to refocus quickly after becoming distracted is a foundational skill to building a strong mental game.
As you meditate, you become distracted, guaranteed. Noticing this distraction is training awareness of when your mind is focused on ineffective cues, like the crowd or things out of your control. Awareness is the first step in refocus training. You cannot refocus if you don’t realize you’re not focused.
Once you trigger this awareness, you open the door that allows you to refocus. This can be done in many ways. The common denominator in how you refocus is landing in the present moment. Although you can focus on the past and future in an effective way mid-game, you’ll usually want to focus on the present moment for the biggest mental game boosts.
How can you focus on the present moment? The senses are a great method because you are anchored in the present while focused on a sense, like how the ball feels in your hands or everything you see on the field. Another excellent method that’s more sport related is picking a part of “the process” that leads to success. You might think about following through, maintaining a certain position with your hands or feet, or reminding yourself of a tactic to execute. It’s important that it’s simple, not overwhelming, and you can perform it in the moment or upcoming moments. If not, you may be quicker to lose focus.
The process is the same when you become distracted during meditation and mid-game. Although you won’t be meditating mid-game, you will become distracted when you inevitably think about something that doesn’t help your performance.
No one is mentally strong enough to shut everything out - the mentally strong athletes are just quick to (1) notice their distractions and (2) come back to effective focus.
This skill is developed through refocus training. You may notice that the act of refocusing is the same in meditation as it is mid-game. You notice that you’re distracted, or thinking about something unrelated to your goal, then you refocus.
Refocus training is great to do in practice and games, but is it enough to train this skill? It’s difficult - there’s a lot you’re already thinking about that makes this difficult.
So, meditation offers an excellent opportunity to train this skill of refocusing. Better yet, meditation has other benefits that can improve your mood and energy. It only takes up to 15 minutes per day. You can even do 5 or 10 minutes; the important part is you’re consistent about it. If you meditate once every now and then, don’t expect many mental game boosts.
The benefits of meditation (refocus training) summarized:
You’re quicker to notice yourself thinking ineffectively during games
Your ability to refocus and shift your thoughts to effective cues is improved
During games, you’ll spend more time in the present moment with focus that improves your performance
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This was a brief overview of meditation and how it can improve sport performance. If you’d like to read a more in-depth article, check out my blog post on meditation by clicking here.
Meditation can be practiced in many different ways. While some people may not resonate with the practice of mediation right away, there is a method out there that is suitable for you.
When it comes down to it, meditating for 10 minutes a day to feel better mentally, in and out of your sport, is convincing enough for many elite athletes to swear by this practice.
If you’d like personalized guidance in your meditation practice, and sport psychology training, schedule a free call with me to see if we’d be a good fit! Click the button below to get started.