Often the fiercest battle an athlete experiences is not the one he fights with his opponent or with the pain and fatigue in his body, but with the voices that resonate within him. Thoughts, emotions and sensations also train, compete and get injured, they don’t stay on the bench or in the locker room, as Yolanda Cuevas, a health and sports psychologist and mindfulness instructor, explains. For this reason, if the athlete is able to relate to their inner experience so that they do not feel hijacked by their thoughts, they will be more attentive and concentrated, they will feel more creative, they will put themselves before the error and, in the case of suffering an injury, you will recover better and faster. “Stress, motivation, level of activation or attention are variables that are related to sports performance,” Cuevas clarifies.
The mindfulness practice and specifically the exercises of meditation are scientifically endorsed techniques that help athletes control negative thoughts and anxiety to focus attention on their abilities and thus be more efficient. But also, as the psychologist Belén Colomina, creator of the guided meditations of ABC Bienestar, clarifies, this activity contributes to improving concentration, decision-making and goal clarity.
Focus and action
Attention is essential in sport, because to perform any action well the athlete must focus on the relevant stimuli that bring him closer to his goal. But there are also other variables that meditation can influence and that also play a decisive role in sports performance. These are, as the specialist in sports psychology Yolanda Moreno points out, the activation response, the regulation of emotions and the improvement of body awareness.
The body activation response it adjusts to the needs of the exercise if the attention is focused on the right stimuli. This means, according to the expert, that if in our mind there are, for example, thoughts of threat, insecurity, anger or fear, the body responds by over-activating and that has its consequences. “Excess activation will hinder performance and in turn will make it difficult for the athlete to focus attention,” Moreno clarifies. That is why it is essential to know how to break this vicious circle and take care where it belongs, that is, take the reins of the attention.
Meditation also helps regulate emotions because with it you learn to observe the thoughts and not let yourself be dragged by them, thus creating a distance that allows you to decide the best answer at all times. “How many times have we lost a competition and that has caused our actions to have been uncontrolled and that we do not respond adequately because we have not focused our attention,” says Moreno. Belén Colomina shares this opinion, who points out that meditation allows us to train emotional balance to keep out the ‘intrusive thoughts’ and the most common afflictions in sport such as fear, anticipation or catastrophic fantasies that are precisely the emotions that they can create added pressure.
On the other hand, theimproved body awareness that is achieved through meditation helps the athlete to be able to generate better mental representations of what he has to do and helps his body respond better to mental images than to verbal instructions.
Fewer injuries
The increased body awareness This is achieved thanks to practices such as body scanning not only allows you to adapt training or competition levels, but can also be useful when injuries occur. «Mindfulness brings greater wisdom to the body, explores limits, helps not to force, reduces the perception of pain and anxiety about it. It is a technique that promotes more positive attitudes in athletes who have suffered some type of injury, ”says Cuevas.
Regarding the application of mindfulness in the pprevention and rehabilitation of sports injuries Cuevas cites the conclusions of the article by Solé, Bruno, Serpa and Palmi published in the ‘Journal of Sports Psychology’ in which it is shown that their contribution can be useful to improve variables such as the balance of sports action, anxiety competition, post-injury emotional reactivity, pain control, improved communication with their environment and their medical team, and improved coping resources.
Likewise, physical and mental recovery after training can also be faster thanks to mindfulbess if it is possible to improve the quality of rest and sleep, according to Colomina.
Physical benefits
- Reduces blood pressure, blood carbon dioxide and lactate concentration.
- Improves breathing.
- Balances the nervous and limbic systems
- Improves relaxation, which promotes sleep
- Provides vitality, optimism and energy
- Greater resistance to stress and less somatization
Psychological benefits
- Increases the activity of the right hemisphere, responsible for spatial orientation, creativity and intuition
- Enhances attention, perception and concentration
- Promotes a calm and objective state of mind, less reactive
- Provides greater security and self-confidence
- Generates a more open-minded attitude
- Increases the feeling of enjoyment with sport.
In the elite it makes a difference
Recently, the Borusia Dortmund player, Erling Halaand, has given visibility to the practice of meditation, celebrating with the traditional posture destined for this practice some of the triumphs of his team, although without a doubt one of the most media examples was the one led by Phil Jackson, who during his time as a coach in the NBA, first for the Bulls and then for the Lakers, introduced meditation into his training sessions, not as an option, but as part of the dynamic. Thus, players such as Michael Jordan and Pau Gasol, as well as the late Kobe Bryant, claimed in their day to have benefited both physically and mentally from the practice of mindfulness.
Other examples who claim to have practiced mindfulbess are that of the American golfer Tiger Woods, tennis players Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer and the player of FC Barcelona, Leo Messi.
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