Hypnosis in sports has a long and rich history of success behind it.
Sports psychologists know very well that there are few champions in any sport whose training does not include psychological preparation. It often includes hypnosis or autohypnosis, at least in the form of progressive relaxation, autogenic training or creative visualization.
Les Cunningham, however, broke this conspiracy of silence with the publication of a book Hypnosport. In it, we can learn, among other things, that at the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956 there were as many as 11 hypnotherapists in the team of the then Soviet Union.
Michael Jordan is probably one of the biggest star athletes to incorporate hypnosis into his training and pregame routines. He practiced hypnosis before every game to experience laser-sharp focus and increased mental stamina. His team saw the success he was experiencing and decided to incorporate hypnosis into their routines as well, which ultimately gave them a better chance of defeating their opponents.
Tiger Woods began experimenting with hypnosis at the age of thirteen, looking for a way to calm his nerves and mind before taking to the course to play a match. He believes that hypnosis has helped him tremendously, as he has been able to completely free his mind from pressure and worry, while allowing him to keep distractions to a minimum. By faithfully practicing hypnosis, he was able to focus and concentrate on his game every time he played.
The relaxed state encourages most other uses hypnosis, such as visualization, ego enhancement, goal setting, pain reduction, and control of arousal and focus. When both body and mind are relaxed, the athlete is more receptive to presenting a perfect performance, accepting suggestions, setting appropriate goals, and influencing ideal levels of arousal. In addition to the suggestions that the athlete receives during the relaxed state, relaxation itself is also important.
We must be aware that the concept of relaxation, when we associate it with the state of how an athlete should feel when practicing a sport, can be misleading. The desired relaxation is not a "state of flaccidity" or the state that an athlete looks like when he is in a trance. A relaxed athlete feels power and control untouched by tension, and his movement is fluid and smooth.
Some athletes describe this state as being "in the flow" or experience a feeling of "overwhelming". Hypnosis and visualization can help an athlete achieve this state of performance.
Although visualization has long been part of an athlete's training routine, the contribution of hypnosis in enhancing the intensity of visualization is almost unrecognized. People often visualize when they are not in a trance, however, visualization in a trance is more clear and powerful.
An additional benefit of trance visualization is that the subject can slow down reality. The ability to distort reality, in our case time, is one of the properties of trance. Time distortion has been shown to be effective in perfecting activities that an athlete cannot practice slowly (diving).
Hypnosis is important in creating the healing power of an athlete and identifying psychological factors in injuries that at first glance appear to be of strictly physical origin. In hypnosis, unconscious and hidden motives are more available to the professional therapist, who can discover them in the athlete. Sometimes the symptom may persist, even though we have removed all the causes for it. This suggests that the problem is deeper and usually more psychological in nature than it appears at first glance. Strained muscles and abrasions, which are a constant in almost every sport, have a clear physical cause. However, we can still use hypnosis to accelerate the athlete's self-healing. In trance, the subject can control certain functions that we consider to be consciously uncontrolled.
Research results show that hypnosis is able to increase the subjective intensity of visualization in several sensory dimensions, in various sports and in situations involving exercise, watching others perform, and competition. In trance, the athletes saw, heard and felt the situation more vividly and were more emotionally involved. This result is probably not surprising to those familiar with hypnosis. It is surprising that so few athletes take advantage of this phenomenon.
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Athletes can use many features of hypnotic trance to improve their performance. The techniques facilitate the learning of new information that can be used in competition, provide general relaxation to improve performance, and aid in the rehabilitation of injuries or pain.
Characteristics shared by these techniques include relaxation, suggestibility, concentration, imaginative skills, reality testing, brain function, autonomic control, and the placebo effect.