Hypnotism as Applied Sports Enhancement

Increasingly, hypnotherapy is being used by many people to improve their performance in sports. Golf is probably the most popular sport which people use applied hypnosis techniques to help with, but it can also be used with many other individual and team sports, including football, rowing and cricket.

Hypnosis and sport are a very effective combination for many reasons.

 Greg Louganis and Tiger Woods hail from different generations and from different sports. However they are both widely considered to the best ever exponents of those sports and they both use mental imagery in order to achieve results.

For example, Greg Louganis would visualize somebody else performing a dive and when he could see it carried out perfectly, he would imagine himself performing the same dive. Tiger Woods imagines himself producing the perfect swing and playing the perfect shot immediately before doing exactly that. He doesn't hit bunkers or obstacles because in his mental images they don't exist.

Imagery and mental rehearsal in sport

It's no secret that sports men and women often incorporate imagery and mental rehearsal into their practice routines. What is less well known is how effective hypnosis can be in this process. When hypnotized you will be able to imagine yourself rehearsing and refining the perfect swing, the perfect goal or running the perfect mile.

Hypnotherapy can profoundly increase our inner beliefs and, in sport, belief is everything. 

Which is more surprising? The fact that Roger Bannister ran a sub four minute mile (a feat which the experts said could never be done) or the fact that in the following eighteen months, forty-five other runners did the same.

Most Hypnotherapists are happy to be contacted with questions regarding hypnotherapy and sport.

Most are equally happy working with individuals and teams, using hypnosis or general mental coaching strategies.

How Can Hypnosis Help Sports Performance?

• Sport Psychology often includes techniques such as mental imagery to focus on future achievement. NLP is very effective with both future rehearsal and anchoring states.
• Anchoring states involves using hypnosis to recall a time of sporting excellence such as winning a race, scoring a goal or playing the perfect round of golf (this can be real or imagined.) At the moment that these feelings of success reach their peak, the emotion is anchored, helping to create what is sometimes known as muscle memory.
• Focusing. This can be on such things as success, strategy and other outcomes.
• Overcoming mental blocks to success.
• Reinforcing self belief and motivation.

There are many other ways that hypnosis can help in sport improvement. For instance the concept of modeling has been used successfully in golf and other sports. In other words, take a top golfer and model what he or she does both physically and mentally.

(Dr.H)     Dr. Rickey Honea  806-792-4164
8212 Ithaca Suite D5, Lubbock, Texas 79423