Zoe Clews & Associates

In the present day and age, successful athletes need to maintain a plethora of qualities, to stay competitive. They not only require superb physical fitness, but also mental clarity and the ability to focus on their goal. Many disregard the second group of requirements for superb performance, only to be left disappointed by the outcome.

One tool that has become viable for improving these mental abilities over the past decades is hypnotherapy for sports performance. The main concept lies with the fact that guided relaxation often leads to better results on the field. Here are a few ways in which hypnotherapy helps athletes on and outside the field:

• Creating healthy habits and helping the person stick to them – hypnotherapy is good for helping athletes build healthy habits and stick to them. There are various fields of life where athletes need to pay special attention to, such as nutrition and establishing a training routine. If they have a stumbling block in any of these, for example, hypnotherapy can help them cope with the change and build discipline.

• Coping with stress – sometimes athletes are under a lot of stress in regards to their performance. Without a proper way to release the built-up pressure, performance starts to wane. Stress is among the factors that vastly impact an athlete’s success. As a way to achieve relaxation, hypnotherapy can help these individuals cope with stress and improve their prep period for the next performance.

• Helps them focus on success and strategy – there is hardly an athlete out there that doesn’t feel at least a little self-doubt. Even when their performance is showing super form, each of them has that voice on the back of their mind telling them that failure is around the corner. What athletes do to counter this is ‘get in the zone’. This is a state, in which they gain full control of their mind and achieve complete focus on the task at hand. The most successful athletes can control this and maintain such a state for prolonged periods. Hypnotherapy is one thing that can help them achieve this effect with ease. Other than helping them access ‘the zone’, such therapy can also teach them to engage their own mind in a way to maintain complete focus to achieve their goal.

• Achieve mental imagery – the most successful athletes out there can picture their own success. The moment before the strike, the trajectory of the ball, the movement of their opponent … they have all that in their mind playing like a movie. This skills build self-belief, which then translates to actual good sports performance. It is quite an essential skill to have too, with sports psychologists actively teaching athletes how to acquire it. Hypnotherapy can do the same. It allows athletes to envision their movements in a slow-motion sequence, taking notes of any mistakes or room for improvement. Thanks to the right expert, they can call on this resource when the right time comes and then utilise it for success.

• Recovery from an injury – one more thing that hypnotherapy’s mental imagery skill can help an athlete with is injury recovery. The recovery process is a long and tedious one, which can often be very stressful. Research shows that keeping a positive mindset and utilizing mental imagery can speed up the process and make it more effective.

Hypnotherapy for sports performance is a great way for an athlete to expand on their skills and become better at the game. To get further info, check out this link - https://zoeclews-hypnotherapy.co.uk/treatments/sports-performance/

© Zoe Clews & Associates