Brain Training For Athletes To Enhance Performance

Just as the physical training makes you gain strength and endurance thus improving your physical performance, mind training also improves your resilience and enhances your overall performance. The mind in many times limits your performance. Brain training for athletes works by enhancing your mental ability to deal with tough, physical challenges that your body endures on the pitch and in training.

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Mental Training For Focus And Beating Fatigue

If you feel too heavy and cannot run any faster, physical training can help deal with the problem by going to the gym and doing more exercise. However, if you find that you cannot run faster even when your muscles feel okay or cannot increase pace even with trying hard, you need mental training against fatigue. This training deals with distraction, cumulative stress and other cognitive demands that you may be having. Thus, if you feel that the track is getting harder with an extended workout, get your brain in shape.

A good example of pre-workout brain training involves sitting in front of your tablet, phone, or computer and perform a classic cognitive task. You may pick such a task as Stroop, Attention Network Task, or Flanker. Concentrate on the task for at least 20-90 minutes. At some point, you will lose interest on the game and the mind will start to wonder off. Looking for answers will also become tiresome. Immediately, start your workout session. The workout would be a little harder that it would have if you had not taken up the task. Try this daily and build resilience.

Mental Training Hacks

Mental training can be undertaken in the middle of your workout. After workout for about sixty to ninety minutes, you may take a computer or a laptop and try cognitive tasks. The intellect learns to work out when it is already stressed which builds resilience and a tough brain. The brain treats any stressor on the track like any of the cognitive tasks improving your performance greatly.

Endurance and resilience are closely built together in the sports world. You have heard people limp off a racing field to the finish line even after tearing a tendon. Resilience is the capacity to take on adversity in the sports field and move beyond them. The rate of bounce back after an accident differentiates between an average athlete and a brilliant one. Here is how to build resilience by mental exercising.

The first most important training is responding to fear, self-doubt, and anxiety. The training starts by acknowledging that these feelings reside in you, and overwhelming them is by having positive feelings such as happiness, success, and gratitude. Refine your brain to focus on positives through rehearsing and reconsolidation.

Making Memory Work To Enhance Your Performance

Memories are distributed across frontal cortex part of the brain all the way to the hippocampus. This is a good exercise for someone who had a bad race due to accidents or disease and is finding it hard to excel in the current race. When you get negative memories, hold on them for a while and bring a positive experience such as when you excelled. This is rewiring your thoughts to good.

After this, de-catastrophize you mind. Lower the thinking of the catastrophic occurrence that you may be afraid of if things went wrong. Think of the actual probability of such an occurrence happening in the track. Think of the outcomes that may come out of the worst-case scenario. Think of the best-case scenario too. Dwell on the positives and put them in whenever you feel the negative ideas coming to your head. Finally, think of the most likely scenario that may play out on the track.

Free Your Mind, Change Your Life

You also need to focus and build on your strengths. Enhance this feeling with building optimism in all that you do. Always remind yourself that you are great at what you are doing. Before the workout, always tell yourself that you are becoming better. If this becomes quite hard, augment it by taking self-assessment tests online. You may also take strengths test.

Filling your attention with the positive thinking will help separate feeling associated with failure and help focus on particular feelings that are positive and beneficial. With time, your mind will beat off failure and help your body achieve even more. Force the positive emotions to ring in your mind always. Sometimes you may mourn and get sad. However, this feeling should not stay in you forever. With this mindset, you will be able to deal with whatever failure you will come across on the track and out there in your daily life.

Free your mind.