Being an amateur athlete isn’t easy. You want to put in the hours to achieve whatever your sporting goals may be. However, there are only so many hours in the day and successfully juggling training, work and home life can often be a stressful experience. Having a clear mind is essential for performing across the board, unfortunately it can often be neglected.
Meditation has been around for centuries and unsurprisingly has founds its way into various fitness regimes. Yoga and meditation seem to spring to the mind of most. In contrast, I want you to think about meditation and how it could improve your sports performance.
The Benefits of Meditation
Research has show that meditation can help manage stress. In addition, meditation can help you reduce anxiety (results of this shown in approx 70% of studies.)
We already know that sleep is essential for recovery and performance. Research suggests that you can improve your quality of sleep through in person meditation.
Studies have also show meditation can improve your working memory, executive functions and your ability to process visual information.
All the above processes and skills relate highly to sports performance, gym performance and overall quality of life. In my opinion, one of the biggest factors that relates to performance is breathing. Meditation often has a strong link to breathing and your control/use of breathing. If you can breathe you can recover, if you can recover you can perform optimally.
“I Don’t Have the Time”
Yes, I admit that I have already stated earlier in this post that there are only a certain amount of hours in the day. However, you shouldn’t consider meditation a task or another job to complete. Use it within your down time, spend 10 minutes on yourself rather than watching another Netflix episode!!
A great app to get you started (and the one I personally use) is called Headspace. Headspace uses a great ‘Take 10″ series of sessions to get you into the swing of things are started. Still not sure? IT’S FREE! They offer their ‘Take 10″ sessions for free, so you can give it a go without spending a penny!
If you want to get the most out of your Personal Training Session In Twickenham, London, you want to be approaching it with a clear and calm mind. Give the app ago and optimise your training today.
