Being an athlete is demanding. As much as an athlete playing a sport needs strength and power for every move, they also require mental peace and balance to be able to strategise. An athlete needs a calm head to make sure that their body does what they want. A complete control of mind and awareness of the ‘now’ is essential to keep oneself focused in the game. This can all be possible with Meditation.
Meditation helps athletes to strengthen their skills with better focus, mindfulness and the ability to maintain calm during the sport, while keeping anxiety at bay. Additionally, meditation also helps the athlete during the training as well, as it helps in relieving stress from the body of the athlete, which can be due to exercises, practice, training,or just the fact that an important event might be approaching.
Athletes generally require high demanding work hours where they indulge in heavyweight training which can be very exhausting for many. Their rigorous training also requires working in extreme situations such as open playgrounds, boxing rings, etc.
To ace the game, they always need to level it up by putting additional hard work in every session. This all can be exhausting for athletes, therefore, to keep up the motivation and sportsmanship level, it becomes very essential to keep the brain at the center with good meditation sessions.
Here are some quick effective and easy-to-perform meditation techniques that can be interestingly done during training, before the game, or post-workout.
Body Scan Meditation
As we have discussed in our previous articles, the benefits of body scan meditation helps in healing the entire body through focus and energy flow. Since athletes train, perform and over-exert their bodies to reach the position of number one in their game, they tend to get tired. However, they can’t afford to be tired while playing as every minute is crucial in their game. Thus, body scan meditation helps them relieve their pain from each body part.
To perform this kind of meditation, you need to sit in a comfortable situation, close your eyes and start breathing. Once you bind a flow of energy, start focusing on your body parts to pass on the energy to heal it.
Mantra Meditation
It is perfectly fine to feel anxious on the night before the competition. An athlete goes through a lot of feelings and thoughts along with excitement and worry, till the time he enters the competition. But various emotions together can disturb an athlete mentally and induce the feeling of worry and anxiety. Therefore, reciting mantras can bring you peace, relax your brain and also allows you to focus on your competition and its strategies.
Any mantra can be chanted before the game a couple of times with closed eyes and in a peaceful environment that doesn’t distract you by giving you an ability to control your mind. This will help you in focusing better and would also allow your mind to become sharp enough to be able to play your best game.
Breathing Meditation
A systematic way of breathing helps in channeling thoughts and calms down the nervous system of athletes to be able to concentrate and plan. Breathing exercise helps in better circulation of oxygen in the entire body including the brain which streamlines the thinking process. Continuous breathing meditation for three to five minutes can certainly help athletes in thinking about the play ahead of them.
Visualise Meditation
Meditation is a good way to bring motivation and enthusiasm along with productivity. Thus, practicing visualizing meditation is definitely a great mechanism to prepare themselves for the competition by imagining their performance, strategy, and win. This is now also called a form of manifestation, as during the process, one tends to be visually imagining their goal and kind of manifesting it for themselves.
It only needs some peaceful and silent environment where an athlete can imagine his game and final goal i.e. winning the trophy. You need to sit quietly somewhere with no distractions and imagine how you want the game or race to play out ahead of you. This is great for more predictable sports like marathons or weight lifting.
Conclusion
Being an athlete is challenging as it demands a person to be stable with their thoughts, training process and championships as there can be several moments in athletes’ lives that leave them in despair with zero motivation. But meditation can help athletes in removing such unfavorable scenarios from their sports careers.