Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Chronicle writes an interesting piece on the use of hypnosis at the Olympic Games . . . Coach Targets Mental Game in High-Pressure Sport (web, page C-12 of the SFC, 17 Aug. 2008).
Regular readers of Life of Brian are already well aware of how effective hypnosis can be for sports performance enhancement.
The obvious use of hypnosis is to work with nerves, calming and relaxing those athletes who have problems with being nervous or who have difficulty focusing in the moment:
Vincent Hancock is a nervous person, who by his own admission simply cannot keep still. But when everything was on the line Saturday and he had to hit two final shots to win the skeet shooting Olympic gold medal, he stepped up and calmly blew the whizzing disks out of the sky. How does a jittery 19-year-old kid from Georgia keep cool under the intense pressure of an Olympic final when everyone around him is sweating bricks? That’s where Daniel Vitchoff steps in. "I specialize in hypnosis," said Vitchoff, a performance coach and sports psychologist hired to work with the U.S. shooting team. "When you are shooting in the Olympics, it comes down to who can best perform under extreme pressure. Out there, everybody is as good as the next person. It’s not a physical thing anymore. The difference between the best and the rest is the mental game." Shooters must control their emotions yet still maintain their intensity and concentration. It is especially hard because there is no physical outlet for all the adrenaline that is building. It is a recipe for the yips. "There are guys who shoot perfect scores in practice and then they fall apart in the competition, " Vitchoff said. "It’s like having a phobia. It gets into their head and tears them apart. A lot of what I do is teach them to let it go." That’s where the hypnosis comes in. The idea, Vitchoff said, is to put the athletes into a meditative state by lowering their blood pressure and heart rate, sometimes with music. Vitchoff then uses what is essentially the power of suggestion to reinforce positive thoughts. He said he goes over the relaxation techniques repeatedly until his subjects are able to reach what he calls the "zone."
One way to approach this is to create what is called The Zone (see the shop in my webpages at http://www.briandavidphillips.com for audio products of this and other types specifically designed for athletes).
"Look at Michael Jordon. When he played, his tongue was out, his jaw was relaxed. He was in a zone," Vitchoff said.
Of course modelling is also ver powerful. I have used this technique as well and it is one of the processes that I have modified for effectiveness in a variety of contexts.
Another technique is called modeling, in which he takes something the athlete is struggling with and has him or her watch video over and over of that particular thing being done successfully. "In our business, we always say success has a structure," Vitchoff said. "If you watch success, you can duplicate it."
Of course, Vitchoff also works with athletes for living habits.
Eating right and proper exercise are crucial parts of such a regimen, Vitchoff said. For shooters, he recommends more protein – because carbohydrates hype you up and then make you crash – and repetitive exercise like running and biking. "The stronger your heart, the slower it beats, so if I have to pull the trigger between heartbeats, I want to work on slowing it down," Vitchoff said.
Thank you to Seth-Deborah Roth (blog) for giving the headsup on this article. Those of us in Taiwan will recall that during the last Olympics competitions, a number of athletes from Taiwan were also using the services of a hypnotist for many of these same competitive improvements.
All the best,
Brian
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