Meditation can help you perform at your best. Its benefits are many, from obvious ones such as the ability to learn how to deal with pressure and expectation, to more obscure ones such as improved recovery through better sleep or higher quality training though increased motivation.
There’s an incredibly interesting link between our physical performance and our mental strength; with the line of our physiological boundaries and our ability to mentally challenge of overcome them a blurry one.
There are many ways the mind can get in the way of our performance and the enjoyment we get from it. Whether you get caught up in the numbers or spend your time competing against yourself or comparing your results against others.
Equally, the mind can be the most powerful tool to overcome and achieve feats that seem beyond humanly possible, performances that speak against the nature of physiology. You might be familiar with the term “to be in the zone” or be in a state of “flow” – when everything seems to fall into place, and how this state of mind can produce optimal experience and performance in sport.
Meditation is one way to understand and harness the power of the mind (in all its forms).
What is meditation?
Meditation is the practice of spending time in quiet thought. What this means is spending time training our awareness and getting a healthy sense of perspective.
It aims to teach us how to observe our environment without judgement and ultimately start to understand it.
Mindfulness meditation is defined as a fully present attention to everything experienced in the moment – whether that’s physical, emotional, spiritual, mental or perceptual – and accepting each aspect with compassion.
The practice of meditating has been proven to lower stress, decrease anxiety, and produce lasting physical changes in the brain. Research has also found that long-term engagement in mindfulness meditation can be effective in helping athletes achieve optimal performance by decreasing ruminative thinking and enhancing the experience of flow.
Mindfulness meditation is a skill; lasting results from practicing it, just like training, take time and commitment.
How meditation can help sports performance
Any athlete who’s attempted a gruelling physical feat, whether it was running a marathon or finishing a hard CrossFit workout, can attest to the fact that fitness is incredibly important, but so is your mental strength.
Sport can bring us our best moments and some of the harshest blows. Pushing our limits and venturing out of our conform zone can bring out emotions we’re not used to experiencing, which in turn can affect us in different ways.
You can use meditation to accept and understand these emotions and gain a healthy sense of perspective in different settings, such as:
- Competition
- Training
- Motivation
- Focus
- Analysis
- Rehab
- Communication
- Recovery
Your performance is impacted by all of these settings, so not only can meditation have an impact on your training, but also on how you view it from the outside.
Dealing with emotions
Regardless of athletic level, athletes around the world deal with confidence issues, the pressure of expectation, nerves, anxiety, negative thoughts, or stress.
High levels of stress decrease your ability to maintain focus and concentration.
But mental focus is required for optimal performance, so using mental strategies to understand and control these emotions has been recommended by sports psychologists for a number of years.
“Historically, athletes used such skills as visualisation or imagery, self talk, goal setting, suppression, distraction and arousal regulation,” writes Alicia Filley in Endurance psychology. These skills promote awareness of thoughts and feelings in order to gain control over them.
Meditation is similar, but it comes with additional benefits.
Looking at these sensations, thoughts and emotions without judgement or action allows athletes to focus on what is needed in the moment, rather than the circumstances they are in, resulting in enhanced mental efficiency.
Inner peace
Achieving a state of flow is only one way meditation can help athletic performance. Being happy and satisfied whit where you are at is another one. It all boils down to controlling your mind.
Having the tools to control negative thoughts and pessimism when the going gets tough, as well as knowing how to not give in to stressful situations, is incredibly invaluable for athletes.
Overcoming mental obstacles
A 2014 study researching how mindfulness improves football performance found that, while there wasn’t a direct correlation between the practice and improved performance, mindful players believed they had greater power over perceived barriers, which in turn indirectly improved their performance.
The practice of mindful meditation can also help athletes build their identity, grow their self-confidence, and help them manage how they react to challenges.
For athletes unable to train, meditation can help them rediscover their identity, support them through injury, or aid them in their transition back into sport or out of it the time comes to move on.
Overcoming physical obstacles
Athletes who visualise accomplishing their goals or objectives, together with breathing exercises, can train themselves to feel more comfortable overcoming physical obstacles, working harder and for a longer period of time during training and competition as a result.
Additionally, the awareness that you gain through meditation can increase your mind-body connection and teach you how to “listen to your body” – enhancing your awareness of your muscles and potential stressors (and hopefully preventing injury).
Types of mediation for sport
The type of meditation you engage in will of course depend on who you are and at which point in life you find yourself, yet an important aspect to consider when choosing the type of meditation you do is what specific skills your sport requires.
Try this 10-minute meditation routine for sport
image sources
- meditation-for-sport: Mathilde Langevin on Unsplash
