As a sports coach or personal trainer, you want to help people achieve their best athletic performance. You help one athlete get that gold medal and you help another achieve good looks or just top fitness, but how can you make sure you give just those extra suggestions that help people really go next-level with their bodies?
Hypnosis and sports
Knowledge of hypnosis, especially high performance hypnosis, can help you help your clients overcome their blockages. So that they can do what is necessary to achieve their sports goals.
In fact, hypnosis can be used for an awful lot of things that are also important during exercise, such as:
- Improving focus
- Improving motivation
- Visualizations
- Dealing with pain
- Relaxation
- Improve self-confidence
Hypnosis can be used to improve athletic performance by promoting relaxation, giving certain suggestions, testing whether what you think is reality is actually reality, giving people more self-control, and making clever use of the placebo effect[1].
Research on basketball players shows that hypnosis helps improve performance and more clear thoughts about certain movements during sports[2].
When counselors are knowledgeable about hypnosis, it is good for their personal development and motivation and can motivate their team or students[3].
Visualizations often play an important role in sports. Many athletes use visualizations to improve their performance. In a study in which athletes were asked to visualize with and without hypnosis, it was found that the visualizations while in hypnosis were much more intense. The images, sounds, movements and feelings during visualization under hypnosis were all more intense than when visualizing without hypnosis[4].
Also, hypnosis can be used by athletes to trigger the flow state . Posthypnotic suggestions can be linked to certain movements, creating the flow state that is important during exercise. Experiences of Olympic athletes show how important it is to practice being able to reach the flow state quickly[5].
Hypnosis while delivering training
So hypnosis helps improve athletic performance and achieve the flow state, how can you use it as a trainer or sports coach?
Visualizations
In any case, you can help an athlete induce hypnosis so he or she knows what it feels like, and then you can apply some techniques to it. For example, you can help the athlete by giving a guided visualization.
You can guide him in, for example, taking the perfect free kick when it comes to soccer. You can guide her in having the best start when it comes to running or skating. Those kinds of visualizations can already do a lot.
Triggering the flow state
You can check the athlete's memories of having and feeling the flow state during hypnosis. For example, the state an athlete once had when he was winning, or performing very well. Chances are, that was the flow state.
Then you can help the athlete link that state to a particular movement. This is also known as anchoring .
The athlete can then make that move to get into the flow state quickly. For example, you often see athletes making certain movements. For example, soccer players who make a cross when they walk onto the field. This often has to do with superstition, but you can also link this kind of movement to the flow state. It can also be a small inconspicuous movement. Like pressing the thumb and index finger together or giving a quick tap on the wrist.
Dealing with pain
Depending on the sport, an athlete may need to go through pain. For example, in long-distance skating, skaters face acidosis and need to skate for miles with aching legs.
Or consider running a marathon, for example.
Hypnosis can therefore help an athlete manage pain so that he or she suffers less.
Visualization can also be used for this purpose. This visualization is not about the movements to improve performance, but rather is a visualization to improve control over pain.
First, this can be practiced in a quiet environment. For example, after training, people can practice turning pain louder or softer with the idea of a kind of volume knob. This is because usually people can make the feeling of pain worse at first. This gives a good entry point, because if you can make something worse, you can also make it less bad.
Through this realization, it is often easy afterwards to make pain less severe. This technique can then also be used during sports.
Another way to deal with pain is to give it a different meaning. For example, through certain suggestions, you can help make this kind of logical pain actually a strength.
In personal training, you can say that pain is the body's signal that you are now building muscle or something similar. This is also called reframing.
Be careful not to disguise pain that is actually from an injury. This, in fact, will only make the injury worse and can destroy an athletic career.
Recovering from an injury
Hypnosis can also be used for recovery. In fact, hypnosis can help speed healing of wounds and even broken bones.
In a study of people with broken bones, two groups were compared. Namely, a group that received individual sessions of hypnosis and audio recordings for self-hypnosis in addition to setting the fracture, and a group that instead received regular care for a bone fracture.
This study found that the group that received hypnotherapy recovered faster than the group without hypnosis. This was also seen in the pictures of fractures, use of painkillers and how quickly they were able to do something again.
As early as the first week, people with hypnosis needed less pain medication. By the sixth week, photos showed a clear difference in fracture recovery. By the ninth week, those with fractures (in this case at the legs), were already able to use their ankles better and walk up and down stairs[6].
So if it can have so much effect in broken bones, what can it do for smaller injuries?
Removing mental blocks
Sometimes it takes more than relaxation and visualizations to improve athletic performance. A person may suffer from mental barriers to achieving certain performances. Reality testing is actually part of this part of hypnosis for athletes.
Many beliefs about how the world works and how you belong or can function are formed in most people's youth. Those beliefs can create mental blocks.
For personal trainers, for example, it can already be one thing to reassure people that panting and sweating is normal, not something dirty or that it says something about someone's health.
For sports coaches, very different things can come into play when you notice that an athlete has reached some kind of plateau, even though you know there is more to be gained from it.
With regression, you can then help people find limiting beliefs, explore their origins and then fix the belief. Ultimately, you are not doing this as a coach, but rather this technique helps the athlete gain new insights that ensure that limiting beliefs are removed[7].
Then you can get back to improving athletic performance.
Learn Hypnosis
So as a sports coach and personal trainer, it can be helpful to learn hypnosis so you can apply all these techniques to the athletes you help.
To deliver high performance hypnosis, basic knowledge of hypnosis and hypnotherapy is helpful. Learning how to induce hypnosis and get people out of hypnosis is then the first step.
At the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands training, you will learn this and learn to pay attention to your client's signals, such as body language or small movements in the face and hands. These can say something about how he or she is feeling at that moment. You can then use that in turn for the hypnotic suggestions you give.
Then it is helpful to master the techniques of visualizations and anchoring the flow state and, of course, the regression technique.
Want to learn more about hypnosis? Then come to the free online master class. or check out our online products .
Or register right away for one of our trainings or courses.
Sources:
