Do you feel that you have hit the wall and no matter what you do you feel that you have reached a plateau. Looking for a new way to approach enhancing your performance?
To perfect your sport and to accomplish any task the body has to know exactly what to do in terms of intent, balance, co-ordination, and breath. The correct muscles have to be used in collaboration with your intent. Research has shown that professionals, in any discipline, use less brain power per task and are more efficient to which muscles are used, combined with a high degree of focus in the present moment.
What Stops Us From Gaining Optimal Performance
The body has a complex wiring of contradictions. In order for us as humans to survive, we have unconscious safety reactions, which respond to what is happening around us and inside us. Our responses are based on how we have learned through trial and error, and as we grow, these responses will sometimes overtly override your conscious instructions. Your response to stress, either to conscious or unconscious, will affect the nervous system. This is one such example, in which the body will respond differently and the result will effect ideal body efficiency.
In Order For You To Perfect Your Skill, You First Must Learn:
- How to readdress what your mind and body is doing in the moment
- Become more mindful of what is happening without reacting
- Relearn how to control your breathing
- Streamline your mind to focus on the task
- Become aware of your which muscles you want to use
- Slow down your movements to create more fluid use of muscles (slowing down the process allows you to form new neural associations to the action and also obtain the full use of the muscle)
- Build up the speed
Why Use A Mind Machine Then?
When driven to achieve more, you aspire to be focused and in control of all aspects which can influence and off set your goals. Understanding the way your brain can influence performance is sometimes overlooked. Fine tuning your mind will help you understand and optimise performance. It is like being shown how to properly use the gears on your bike to become more efficient rather than being just doing what looks right; an awareness of your state of mind and how to change it, is what sports psychologists do best.
What a mind machine will do, is help put you in these states so you can identify more easily where your awareness should be for specific parts of your training.
Out of the box settings for standard mind machines have a variety of different helpful settings, these include:
- Beta sessions to boost energy prior to competing
- Alpha sessions to improve your mental imagery
- Relaxation sessions to encourage better sleeping patterns
With the proper training and use, there are more refined benefits with the use of a mind machine. Every mind machine has typical ways to use these sessions to focus on specific parts of your training…
The Benefits Of Using Alpha Settings
When you use your mind machine to become entrained to Alpha frequencies, your mind is able to learn and refine cognitive function specific to an improvement in:
- Improving mental focus
- Reducing mind chatter
- Allowing greater attention to your body
- Helps you to enforce the creative visualisation process needed to trigger positive frames of mind (hypnosis and NLP)
This is an optimal state for changing the thought patterns which inhibit and contribute to success. Your mind changes state constantly as it uses different mental processes. When your mind is in Alpha, you have clearer access to the the way the mind creates and rationalises. This is key in factor when enforcing positive frames of mind and resolving or dissolving many memory based habits, which inadvertently disrupts your focus.
The ability to readdress past memories and how they are stored, and the emotions relating to them, makes an incredible difference. Just to consciously imagine a past event causes changes in how your body responds. This happens unconsciously also and is why trained professionals use mind machines to help unlock these triggers to exploring your true potential.
Benefits of Using Beta Settings
Studies have shown that when actively engaging in focused, physical activity, your mind is more tuned to beta activity. When in this state, you are more alert and focused and are more aware of the task in hand. I want you to remember a time, when you carried out anything for the first time. This feeling is sometimes known as the ‘”beginners mind”. When engaging in anything new, which involves actual physical movement, your mind is in this state of beta. Professional performers of all descriptions, show a higher level of beta activity. This is preferred when you want more focus on the tasks without distraction. In Beta, your brain is focused on task and is more aware of how your body responds to external information,
A point to be aware of is, Once a skill is learned the motor skills become more automatic, this is good in that you don’t have to keep relearning a set of movements from scratch ,but in order to keep improving you need to keep in this state of alertness, What happens is the mind will fall back into an Alpha state.
As your mind drops back into alpha, it opens other parts of the mind which replay its experience and also to find common links, depending on the individual Thought of past failures, injuries and other stresses, this is why exploring the mind in Alpha to resolve such issues is desirable.
Good coaching helps to keep your mind engaged in your actions and to encourage this beta state. Using a mind machine on a beta session, before a practice session, could help reinforce the state of active alertness.
Benefits Of Mind Machine Relaxation Settings
This is a somewhat overlooked part of any athletes training; your ability to relax properly is just as important as your warm up before training. Relaxation is not about just stopping, it serves much more of a purpose:
- To allow the nervous system to balance
- To allow the body to recuperate from training
- To keep the circadian rhythms In balance
- To let your mind process the days events
- To allow major restorative functions in the body like muscle growth
- Tissue repair
- Encourages protein synthesis
- It encourages growth hormones (in beta state)
When it comes to any sport, warming up and down should not be the end of your focus, learning to relax properly and consistently gives your body and mind the opportunity to give you its full potential.
Remember you are not just using your body to do an activity, it is every part of you which is involved. Learning to relax your body, slow down your mind, and being aware of your breathing helps you become more in sync with what’s going on and helps to allow your body to naturally repair and restore itself.
When relaxed you can more effectively
- Learn how to become more aware of how the whole system works.
- Allow your body to heal
- Identify imbalance and posture issues
- Relax muscles and identify stress
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