How Hypnotherapy Can Improve Enhance Sport Performance

I have worked with many sportsmen and women and sports personalities over the years helping them visualise their success believe in their success and go on to make that success a reality.

Hypnosis can be used to encourage the right sort of messages to be transmitted from the mind to the body, for instance, a more relaxed stance when taking a golf swing, or an extra degree of determination that helps you overcome physical resistance in a sporting event.

Many well-known athletes have worked with qualified hypnotherapists to achieve significant gains in their performance regardless of their discipline. After all, the unconscious mind is the driving force behind most of our beliefs and behaviours so it makes sense that a technique aimed at changing thoughts at an unconscious level will prove highly effective.

Tiger Woods is a fine example of a top sportsman who has used hypnosis to achieve a phenomenal level of success in golf. He has reportedly been using self-hypnosis techniques since his early teens. Not only visualise each swing and stroke but he also uses it to get in the zone – to focus. Another way in which hypnosis can be utilised in competitive sports is in dealing with pain and injuries. Learning to disassociate from the pain can help them cope better with it and perform despite it.

Sports hypnosis works on the principle of the mind-body connection, and as advances in neuroscience and psychology have been made and the science studied, we know now that the two are unequivocally linked. Our minds and our bodies are in constant communication with a flow of neurotransmitters from the brain to the cells of the body and back again. The mind tells the body how to behave, and the body tells the mind how to feel and how to behave. And as you can imagine, this has profound implications for sports performance.

Hypnosis and guided imagery have been used by many athletes to improve their game a

treatment that has been proven to be highly effective in bringing about positive change, developing new habits and behaviours and new ways of thinking both logically and creatively.