Being a Cognizant Athlete

I have been reading The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford. I've been running a lot but have been losing focus lately. It's a fascinating book about how your mental game is just as important as your physical one. Check out the book on Amazon if you haven't read it yet.

Get the superpowers of mindfulness you will need for top performance!

Maybe you have seen someone make a 90-yard touchdown run or complete the 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds? If you have, you’ll understand that such accomplishments are things of beauty. They appear like things only a superhero could do – not the achievements of mere humans. And these performances that are physical require more than just a well-trained body, so what enables these sportsmen to do what most individuals can’t?

It’s about using its possible superpowers to achieve top performance and training your head. But these techniques are to enhancing your athleticism n’t limited. Whether at work, in school or perhaps to improve life in general, we’d all prefer to enrich our performance. Using the idea of the mindful sportsman as a jumping-off point, we’ll explore the practices that’ll get you in peak condition.

Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can discover your superpowers.

People find enlightenment in different manners. Some journey to India; others do yoga. The author, for George Mumford, it was the pain of reaching rock bottom that drove him to discover his own superpowers, mindfulness and, as a result. Here’s his narrative:

In middle school, Mumford was a gifted basketball player. He appeared poised for a professional career. And then he got injured while training. Instead of letting his body regain, yet, he kept playing; this destroyed his shot at a career in professional sports, and wore his body down.

Instead of playing for the NBA, he visited the University of Massachusetts, where he studied finance and abandoned his dream. Since youth, understood only one way to handle pain, whether mental or physical: drown it in alcohol is ’ded by him. To fight the emotional pain brought on by his dreams that were compromised, in addition to the persistent pain caused by his injuries, he started self-medicating. And his medicine of choice was Seagram’s Seven whiskey.

Mumford did n’t smoke cigarettes or marijuana because he was concerned about how they would affect his physical development, so he went directly for heroin when he began taking drugs.

In 1984, he got a staph infection that was serious. Mumford calls this his Ass On Fire scenario, or AOF. His AOF driven him to finally make an alteration, so he joined his first twelve-step program: Alcoholics Anonymous.

Where he was first introduced to mindfulness, which, in the 80s that is ‘, was called “stress management.” his AA program was Through yoga and meditation, instead of numbing his pain, he learned to listen to his body.

For decades, Mumford eventually left his job as a financial analyst to commit himself to teaching mindfulness to others and continued practicing mindfulness at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center.

That’s how Mumford came to develop the thought of the five superpowers: mindfulness, concentration, insight, right effort and trust. Let’s look.

Mindfulness, is about focusing on your inner self.

Picture you’re delivering a demonstration. You can’t focus because you’re about exactly what the crowd thinks of you worried. Mindfulness could be the savior here. But just how do you become aware?

Mindfulness comes from within. Everybody has a quiet, internal strength that will shield them from outside distractions.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the godfather of mindfulness, said that mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment as in case your life depended on it.
Needless to say, that’s easier said than done, because we’re always surrounded by distractions. Our minds leap from topic to topic just like a monkey swinging from branch to branch.

Buddhists call this monkey head. The monkey head is difficult to command, but it can be pacified by you by practicing Buddhism. And once you get to a high state of self-control, you’ll find yourself.

In sports, the Zone is the best experience; it is entered by sportsmen when performing at their highest potential degree.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi considers when your skill and also the situation’s challenge are high and equivalent to every other, the Zone encounter happens. The Zone is much like the calm at the center of a storm. It’s what keeps the aware sportsman in the present moment.

And that means you need to be conscious of emotions and your thoughts. You are able to practice mindfulness meditation by sitting still, focusing on your own breathing and practicing bare awareness: staying mindful of what’s going on in your mind and body in the present moment.

It’s simple to get distracted while doing this. You recall a nice memory, and could sense a wind, for instance and start to dwell about it.

By becoming a Watcher, it's possible for you to prevent this. Being a Watcher means observing what’s happening in your thoughts rather than letting it control you. Remain in charge of your ideas. Don’t let it be the other way around.

Concentrate on your breathing

In the 2013 NBA playoffs, some camera individuals caught LeBron James sitting court side with closed eyes , focusing on his breathing. Concentrating on breathing in this way is among the most essential portions of practicing mindfulness.

By controlling your breathing you are able to enter a state of rest. Think about the space between an inhalation and an exhalation as your interior center, where your Watcher sees everything. This form of AOB, or Consciousness of Breath, brings you back to the present moment.

Our breathing works in tandem with two other elements of our autonomous nervous system, each of which regulate other body functions and our heart rate.

The very first is the sympathetic system, which can be activated by panic, worry and strain. It floods our body with stress hormones, increases our blood pressure and makes our respiration shallower.

The next is the parasympathetic system. It discharges the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which makes us more relaxed and lowers our pulse. So when you focus on your own breathing, your parasympathetic system kicks into action.

Conscious respiration also can get you into seconds of flow. Close your eyes the simplest way to practice AOB is always to sit down and concentrate on the atmosphere moving in and out of your lungs.

You do an internal body scan, where you picture breathing through various parts of your own body and can also lie down.

You do n’t get right into circumstances of stream by discontinuing your focus; you get by concentrating on as few stimulation as you can. Our brains typically focus on a number of things simultaneously. Reducing that number is what will enable you to get into the Zone.

That his breathing was being focused on by LeBron James: it enabled him to maintain the Zone when he stepped back onto the court.

Insight is about understanding your impact they the own thoughts and have on your life.

There are a lot of gifted people in the whole world, but few of them reach their full potential. Why is that? Because they don’t totally believe in themselves.
Most people aren’t totally aware of the effect their beliefs have on their life. Our beliefs don’t merely exist in our minds, yet: they manifest themselves as customs.

So, should you want to change your behaviour, you need to take into consideration the fundamental thoughts behind them and also your customs. To put it differently, you must understand the mental blueprint your beliefs are founded upon. Here's another way to think about it: scrutinizing the thoughts behind your habits is like looking under the hood of your own car, instead of simply staring at the dashboard.

Everyone has a unique set of emotional blueprints, which contains other negative emotions along with their insecurities. It’s important to be conscious of these blueprints that are mental, as the ones that are negative can build up over time and burst out in negative actions.

That’s what happened when one of the very talented soccer players in history, Zinedine Zidane, lost his humor and headbutted Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup.

Succumbing to negativity like Zidane did will just hinder your progress. Practicing mindfulness means letting go of who you think you're. So accept negative emotions like bitterness or anger for what they actually are: fleeting distractions that shouldn’t define you.

Look at errors and failures this way, too. Your errors don’t define who you are! And failures are simply opportunities.

Michael Jordan, one of the very best basketball players in history, adopted this idea in his “failure” advertisement for Nike. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” he said, “...lost almost 300 games. I’ve failed over and over again in my own entire life. That’s why I triumphed.”