6 Ways to Immediately Increase Your Sports Performance
Wouldn’t it be great to master 6 ways that will immediately increase your sports performance? I have worked with 20 PGA and LPGA athletes in successfully helping them improve sport performance, and am happy to say I have expanded my focus to include Olympic Athletes, Professional Surfers, Boxers and Tennis Players. Anyone looking to improve their performance will benefit from the insight I bring, to help improve one’s ‘mental game’ in order to achieve peak performance.
How does someone achieve great performance in athletics? Of course, practicing the mechanics and putting hours of hard work into learning the sport is a must. You can spend money on a professional to teach you mechanics, and then practice what you learn over and over. However, mastery of mechanics alone will not guarantee you success. You must master your mental game in order to achieve peak performance or you will struggle come game time.
What do people think about when they perform their job or sport? If people doubt their abilities or show up feeling afraid or anxious, their performance will suffer with a lack of confidence. You can minimize your fears and work towards the best performance possible by controlling the following six things:
- Sleeping well / getting enough rest before an event
- Eating well / getting proper nourishment for body strength
- Exercising / ensuring adequate endurance to draw from physically
- Drinking enough fluids / getting proper hydration for your body
- Honing your mechanics / practicing continually to ensure proper skill mastery
- Improving Mental Skills / taking the “thinking” out of the event
You want to ensure you progress in all of these areas to achieve the feeling of being on “auto-pilot”, where you can take thinking out of your equation. You might hear someone talk about being “in the zone” when they perform, and their body just does what it knows to do. When you turn a door knob or walk every day, years after learning how as a baby, you no longer think about how to do it…you just do it. That is auto-pilot. When you are just present in a moment and your body has a life of its own, doing what it knows how to do, without anything in your surroundings having an effect on its’ performance.
Anything repeated enough over time can go on auto-pilot; like learning how to ride a bike or drive a car. We learn and evolve through exposure to new things and then repeating them. Our capabilities are strengthened with repetition, and repetition without thought becomes a behavior or action on auto-pilot.
Why would you ever doubt your abilities on auto-pilot? Anxieties over memories of falling off a bike, or analyzing different scenarios in fear of what could happen. Thinking about previous experiences creates problems in performance for athletes. That fear you bring in basically mucks up your performance.
So how do you eliminate that problem? You learn to trust your mechanics by performing tasks daily. You increase your faith in your ability to do what you have trained so hard to do.
You do not stop practicing just because you think you know how to do something. When you stop doing a task over a period of time, the neurotransmitters and synopsis pathways in your brain will weaken; as a trail through the woods will become overgrown and difficult to traverse when no longer used. You keep practicing and tweaking the mechanics of your sport. But you must learn to trust, and you cannot trust without practice or repetition. That is necessary to reach the ‘auto-pilot’ state.
So how to you learn to trust yourself? You form a belief system by making daily suggestions to yourself on things you know how to do. You look for areas in your daily life that are on auto-pilot and remind yourself of your trusted ability to do those things. You build trust in what you don’t think about doing anymore, as a means of developing trust in yourself in other areas.
You will see tremendous payback in your sport performance by following the six steps I outlined above, and focusing on building trust in your auto-pilot ability.
AND, since this works so well on sport performance, I am expanding my reach to help people with overall career success, lower stress in their lives, achieve greater health and sense of well being, weight-loss and improved fitness. I know all of this is possible for you, as so many have realized the benefits from my insights and techniques already.
I look forward to helping you achieve peak performance in whatever you do. Thanks, and hope to see you soon!
