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 strategize. An athlete needs a calm head to make sure that their body does what they want. Complete control of the mind and awareness of the ‘now’ are essential to keeping oneself focused on the game. This can all be possible with meditation.
Meditation helps athletes 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 training, as it helps relieve stress from the body, which can be due to exercises, practice, training, or just the fact that an important event might be approaching.
Athletes generally require 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 in additional hard work in every session. This all can be exhausting for athletes; therefore, to keep up the motivation and sportsmanship level, it becomes 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 help heal the entire body through focus and energy flow. Since athletes train, perform, and overexert 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 to their game. Thus, body scan meditation helps them relieve the pain in each body part.
To perform this kind of meditation, you need to sit in a comfortable position, 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 them.
Mantra Meditation
It is perfectly fine to feel anxious the night before the competition. An athlete goes through a lot of feelings and thoughts, along with excitement and worry, until the time he enters the competition. But various emotions together can disturb an athlete mentally and induce feelings of worry and anxiety. Therefore, reciting mantras can bring you peace, relax your brain, and allow you to focus on your competition and its strategies.
Any mantra can be chanted before the game a couple of times with closed eyes in a peaceful environment that doesn’t distract you and gives you the ability to control your mind. This will help you focus better and will 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 so they can concentrate and plan. Breathing exercise helps in the 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 think about the play ahead of them.
Visualize Meditation
Meditation is a good way to boost motivation and enthusiasm, along with productivity. Thus, practicing visualization 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 a 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 weightlifting.
Conclusion
Being an athlete is challenging as it demands a person to be stable with their thoughts, training process, and championships. There can be several moments in athletes’ lives that leave them in despair with zero motivation. However, meditation can help athletes remove such unfavorable scenarios from their sports careers.