Imagine a training tool that can help your athletes to perform better under pressure, handle the pain of loss and under-performing more effectively, suffer from fewer injuries and recover from them faster, improve decision making and learning, AND lead better lives that adhere more closely to the programme of training that we create for them. Now imagine that this training tool is completely free and portable. Nearly every strength coach and sport scientist on the planet would beat a path to your door for this tool.
Good news: this tool already exists and it’s name is meditation. Bad news: most coaches and sport science guys (myself included) are also extremely logical, rational and scientific types who avoid pseudoscience, unproven methods and fluffy sounding ideas. Thus, due to it’s association with religion and other unfounded ideas, the practice of mediation has been thrown on the S&C junk heap along with crystals, Scientology and praying to the baby Jesus.
However in recent months, I have actually revised my opinion about the application of meditation to athletes, inspired mostly by Healer Omar Botha...
I have hit the books and was pleasantly surprised to learn that there is a lot of science on mediation, which can be of great potential use to athletes.
These three academics, along with more coaching experience has led me to conclude there are some fundamental truths about training athletes and successful athletic performance, namely:
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All stress response begins and ends with the brain- if your brain is stressed, your body is stressed. You cannot relax and recover if your brain is stressed.
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Optimal training is permitted when we minimise non exercise stressors to maximise training stressors. Likewise optimal adaptation when training training ends happens in the absence of mental and physical stress.
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Elite performance requires high development of motor skill, cognitive processing, decision making and learning. Chronic stress turns all these processes to shit, harming performance in the short term and athlete development in the long term.
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Happy athletes are far more likely to make good life decisions outside of training. Unhappy or distracted athletes rarely help a coaching culture or programme.
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In a nutshell management of stress is a huge variable in how successful we are as coaches and athletes.
Meditation for athletes
The purpose of this article is to introduce you to some of the science underpinning meditation, discuss how mediation techniques may improve various aspects of performance and recovery, and lastly to share some resources I am currently using with my athletes so you can try them for yourself.
The philosophical argument for meditation
Before we jump straight into the science and sporting side of things, let’s begin with the philosophical rationale for meditation. I think it serves to show how meditation began and also how you might be able to benefit from it in regular life even if you don’t care for the science/aren’t a coach or athlete.
This is plagiarised straight from Sam Harris’ book: in a nutshell all human experience is transient: all of our pain, all of our happiness, everything in our experience is temporary. We feel a certain way for a certain amount of time, then it subsides. This is why when we eventually get the thing that we have been craving for so long and that we think will finally make us “happy”, that the good feelings do not last as long as we hope. We then quickly get unhappy again, start craving the next thing, and an endless cycle of seeking and unfulfilment perpetuates.
In order to break this cycle and liberate ourselves from the suffering it entails, we have to recognise that all experience is subjective. We only feel a certain way because our brain perceives it in that manner, and this perception is firmly within our control. Just think about your proudest achievement or worst embarrassment right now and you’ll be able to muster the emotion and change your psychological state on thought alone. If we can learn to separate our experiences from our emotions, we can learn to suffer less and lead happier lives.
The argument goes even further (with science to back it up), stating that ultimately there is “me” or “I”. Human consciousness is not one entity, it is malleable and it can be divided. The self is an illusion and a tortuous one at that. The sooner we can turn our attention and thought inwards, the sooner the illusion is recognised, and the sooner we stop suffering. This may sound a little out there but I encourage you to read the book as the author makes a very reasoned, logical and documented case. Enough philosophy, on to the science:
The wandering mind and self centred thinking
The starting point of meditation science is wandering thought, also known as “stimulus independent thought”. This is the type of thinking we do when there is nothing external requiring us to focus our attention: “I wonder what is for dinner?”, “Why haven’t I been promoted at work?”, “How does Snooki from Jersey shore live with herself?” etc. All are examples of wandering thought, which researchers estimate at the low end occupies 50% of our every waking moment.
An interesting finding is that there is a significant correlation between how much time we spend in wandering thought and how unhappy we perceive ourselves to be. In the words of one paper: “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
The areas of the brain most associated with thought when we are not focussed on a specific stimulus are the midline prefrontal cortex and the midline parietal cortex. These areas are referred to at the “Default mode network” because they are most active when we are in our default mode, when we have no stimulation and our minds begin to wander.
Interestingly the default mode network will become more active when we are tasked with self representation i.e. thinking about various aspects of ourselves. Contrastingly when we focus on external stimuli and tasks, the DMN becomes inhibited. This might be why many people “lose themselves” in their work. Though they are not working or concerned with the outside environment, a similar effect is seen in meditators, and the inhibition of the DMN is most pronounced in experts.
Meditation and the brain
The above alone suggests that meditation might be useful in increasing perceived happiness of athletes. However there are several other extremely promising neurological, psychological and physiological changes that meditation has been associated with in the literature.
Amazingly meditation, the act of thought alone, has been shown to create physical changes in the structure of the brain (try doing this with your biceps!). Interventions of mindfulness and transcendental mediation have been shown to increase the mass of the corpus callosum and hippocampus areas of the brain. Respectively these areas are responsible for the communication of information between the left and right sides of the brain, and the formation of memories, recalling existing memories and controlling of emotions. The implies that meditation may assist in thinking, problem solving, motor learning and decision making- all very useful traits for athletes to possess.
Meditation has also been shown to increase grey matter thickness and cortical folding within the brain. There is also evidence to suggest that these change may help to slow age related decline. This is not an immediate concern in young people but with the damaging effects of concussion on contact sport athletes it makes me wonder if it may help this population in some way.
Whereas the above areas hypertrophy in response to meditation, the amygdala- the part of the brain for regulating emotion and primal instincts like aggression- has been observed to shrink following an 8 week intervention of mindfulness meditation, which was accompanied by a decrease in the subjective experience of stress. A quick look at the research and common knowledge will tell you that performance and injury risk tends to go to crap when an athlete experiences a high amount of stress outside of training, so any tool we can equip athletes with to combat this may be worth investing in.
Lastly, a five week programme of meditation consisting of only five minutes per day increased activity in the pre-frontal cortex which is associated with problem solving, planning, decision making, deriving insight and also keeping our more primitive, animal instincts in check- I know of a few professional players who could use the last of these.
Psychological and physiological changes following meditation
So how do these structural changes within the brain manifest themselves psychologically and physically? Well one study has shown that a day of meditation practice for novices reduced the expression of genes triggering inflammation, and reduced the magnitude of the body’s physical stress response to a high pressure situation, in this case public speaking. Whilst the arenas of high pressure competition and public speaking are not identical there are certainly similarities and examples of athletes who crumble on the big stage abound. What is more chronic inflammation is associated with injury and disease, and impaired healing and recovery following exercise.
Similarly meditation has been shown to positively impact immune function (important for resisting high physical training loads and recovering from injury and illness), blood pressure and cortisol (the primary hormone of the stress response that breaks down the body for energy liberation and ultimately starts us on the path to overtraining, injury and illness).
Another investigation showed that expert meditators with several thousand hours of experience responded to pain differently to regular people. Though they could accurately perceive how intense a painful stimulus was, they were able to react less stressfully to it. They were also able to show less anxiety in anticipation of a painful situation, accommodate to pain more quickly and deal with it for longer. Whether these benefits can be derived with less than 10,000 hours of practice remains to be seen, but in high level sport, particularly contact sports, athletes must be able to deal with pain and discomfort on a daily basis if they expect to succeed.
Psychologically, meditation is associated with reduced anxiety, depression, neuroticism and emotionally charged behaviour. Whilst it is possible to be an elite athlete and exhibit these traits in abundance, it is usually in spite of rather than because of this, and I would bet good money that addressing these issues would improve performance to an even higher level.
There also appears to be an improved ability to reframe negative experiences following meditation as demonstrated in soldiers suffering from PTSD. I believe this would be beneficial for athletes as sport is rife with disappointment and there are many high level careers that have been ruined due to failure to deal with catastrophic mistakes made on the big stage. Being able to deal with this in a productive manner and also deal with the high level of criticism that athletes invariably face can only be a good thing.
What type of meditation should I be doing?
There are many techniques of meditation I have seen in the literature, but it seems that the two most frequently employed are mindfulness meditation and transcendental meditation. My understanding is that the difference between the two is as follows:
Transcendental meditation is chiefly about trying to relax and remove one’s focus on external events and stimuli, essentially letting them fall away. In a word is it passive. On the other hand mindfulness appears to more be more about effortful concentration on the flow of experience, being mindful of thoughts and internal head noise as it arises. In a word it can be summed up as “active”.
I have tried both and mindfulness meditation is quite difficult. With my personality, I want to try hard to have no thoughts, which makes me have thoughts, which makes me try harder, and so it goes round and round my head! Personally I find TM a lot easier to do and I feel a lot more relaxed and less frustrated at the end than following mindfulness. Though it would appear that mindfulness meditation is more effective for achieving the philosophical goal of realising “the illusion of the self”, as coaches and athletes we are primarily more interested in relaxation and achieving the physiological and psychological benefits of meditation. For this reason I’m currently leaning more towards utilising transcendental meditation with my athletes.
How do I do it?
Personally I just let the client lie down in a comfortable position, legs unfolded, eyes closed, no distractions and then I guide them by listening to my voice...
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