If you think baseball hypnosis is nonsense, you are likely unaware of the many professional athletes who utilize hypnosis. One of the famous quotes by the legendary player and coach, Yogi Berra, is “Baseball is 90 percent mental, the other half is physical.” He got that right more than a half century ago. Baseball is a game that mostly relies on the player’s state of mind. However, baseball is not the only sport that can benefit from hypnosis.
The Effects of Performance Anxiety
You have to perform an activity that requires you to be ‘in the moment’
You think about all the things that could go wrong
The anxiety gets in the way of your own performance
Sports Performance Hypnosis has been involved in sporting at some of the most sophisticated sporting venues in the world. For instance in 1956, the Soviet athletic team travelled with 11 hypnotists to the Melbourne Olympics. Heavyweight boxing champion, Ingmar Johannson used hypnosis training before his 1959 winning match against Floyd Patterson. In 1984, Mary Lou Retton underwent hypnosis. That year she won the American Classic gold medal at the LA Olympics.
Phil Jackson makes basketball hypnosis a part of training for championship basketball. Known as the “Zen Master,” Jackson coaches the Lakers and before that he coached the Chicago Bulls. One of the top coaches in the world, he knew the value of basketball hypnosis very early on.
Some other famous sports people who used hypnosis are:
1) Tiger Woods who started hypnosis and mental training when he was 10 years old
2) Rod Carew used hypnosis to deal with the pain that remained after an injury. The pain was on the verge of ending Carew’s career. Hypnosis took him past the pain to a.400 batting average.
3) George Foreman, Greg Louganis, and Wayne Gretzky used hypnosis as part of their training as they knew it enhanced their performance and helped them set records.
4) Don Sutton and Nolan Ryan both increase performance through baseball hypnosis.
Hypnosis can help reprogram your mind and facilitate behavioral change
The NYC Hypnosis Center 5 Step Baseball Sports Hypnosis Program
- Identify What Causes a Lack of Focus
- Replace Negative Thoughts with Truthful yet Positive Statements
- Practice Visualization
- Assist in Reprogramming the Way You Think About Pressure and Competition
- Teach Self Hypnosis
Baseball hypnosis can reshape your mental mind-set – removing negative thoughts and bringing in positive ones. As many people know, if you try too hard, you can freeze up. If freezing up inhibits you, imagine what an unfocused mind can do. If a player is distracted, his or her normally automatic physical responses to the game can be limited. Ideally your mind has to be completely in tune with your body.
As you wind up for a pitch, your mind and your arm have to be attuned to each other. If your mind is trained to recognize the feelings of playing like a champion, peak performance comes naturally and effortlessly. Hypnotism uses relaxation, concentration, positive suggestions and imagery to bring the power of the subconscious to the game. These all focus on the way moves should be made, how the ball should be thrown, and how the bat should swing. Using the memories stored in the subconscious mind, hypnosis trains your mind to direct your body to respond optimally and spontaneously.
The reason for the smoother and faster responses to the game is that hypnosis conditions your subconscious to make each required mental process an automatic event. Just as you don’t think about breathing, you don’t think about tuning your mind to the championship mode that makes you an amazing player. It becomes an instinctive part of the process.
Your body will move and respond on its own during the game. This can help overcome the delay between brain message and response. There is power behind your play and the power is not just muscle power, but mental power as well. Your subconscious stores all your memories and uses them spontaneously to form your reactions to people and events.
Hypnosis for Baseball uses these memories to reshape your attitude towards your previous games and shape your assessment of upcoming games. This allows you to retain and access the amazing feelings that will help you play at the highest level. Your body accepts your mind’s assurance that this is the right attitude and the right stance. It does not need to stop for the seconds normally needed to send these mental messages to your body. The result is that you are a faster and more powerful baseball player.
Hypnosis is a natural state, that when achieved, allows your hypnotist to access your subconscious mind. When you watch a movie, read a book, or focus on a project at work and lose track of time, you are experiencing hypnosis. Once a client is guided into hypnosis, we at the NY Hypnosis Institute can then give positive suggestions directly to the subconscious mind.
A New York Hypnosis Baseball Hypnosis session can retrain your mind to:
•Enhance your concentration and focus
•Increase your confidence
•Reduce anxiety and stress
•Achieve peak performance
•Remain poised in the most competitive situations
Disclaimer: Results may vary from person to person