Let’s begin with our friend, Fear. We met Fear as a small child. You may not remember the initial meeting, but Fear was there all along. Fear started out a small part of our life. Simple Fear, we shall call our friend. We started out being afraid of the dark, afraid of our parents, afraid our friends wouldn’t play with us, afraid our mom wouldn’t let us by a new GI Joe. Simple Fear was there the whole time, silently waiting and growing into what we know as Fear today. As a child, Simple Fear rarely presented itself, and we were able to climb the highest trees, jump off the highest points, ride our bikes down the steepest hills with our eyes closed and our hands off the handlebars. We would fall on our faces and take all the skin off our knees, but we would stand up and do it over again. We weren’t afraid of anything beyond such simple fears because we hadn’t yet met Fear. I see my daughter practicing gymnastics, flipping all over the place and trying new tricks, falling over and over and over again—she is never afraid of her misses and always attacks each trick as if she hadn’t just missed it 23 times. Why? Well, because she doesn’t know my best friend Fear. I miss and I am suddenly afraid of the next lift. I miss and I remember it for days. I miss and Fear taunts me. How do you control Fear? Baby steps…



Relaxing and Breathing

As touched on in the first part of this series, when you learn to master the ability to relax, it will enhance your strength, flexibility, energy, and focus. When you are tense, you waste energy and effort in even the simplest movements; your body becomes tense and you exert energy from muscles that aren’t even needed in the movement being made. Relaxation allows you to trust your strength, your skill, and your power. The inability to relax disables your thinking and focus, and delays clear and stable breathing. Your muscles lose flexibility and fluidity, and your performance is hindered. You become anxious, tense, and your body and mind is suddenly stressed. When you practice and master physical and mental relaxation, your heart’s arterial pathways open up for better circulation, and your lungs are able to expand to increase oxygen consumption. With this, your muscles are able to lose the tension, your mental approach can be more tranquil and your performance improves.

In order to put a stop to the things that can inhibit your success, you need to learn to focus your breathing and relax . Only then can you see your way clearly in order to establish a firm balance for success in approved performance. Once you have learned to control your degree of relaxation physically, mentally, and emotionally, you can notice when tension is developing and take the steps necessary to release it. Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this applies to us in sport. As you train, relax—don’t force your muscles or your mind. If our mind and body’s action is that of tension and stress, than that is what is going to come back to us as performance results.

Bud Winter is known as one of the greatest Track Coaches of his time. He produced 102 All-Americans and 27 Olympians by diligently following, and enforcing, the Taoist paradox, soft is strong. He believed that keeping your body soft (or relaxed) would give you the most strength. He expanded this paradox, developing the “ninety percent law” in which he believed that running or performing at ninety percent effort stimulates relaxation and results in faster and snappier movement, more strength, a much sharper vision, less fatigue, and an improved sense of well being in competition. He believed that relaxation is the most widely ignored aspect of athletic training programs in the United States, and yet the most crucial . You can read more about his tactics in his book, Relax and Win: Championship Performance in Whatever You Do. Supreme performance occurs in an athlete when they are able to mentally, emotionally, and physically relax and harmonize before and throughout a competition.

So how do we do this? I like to start with breathing.

Vengeance. When I start to get myself all worked up in a frenzy of doubt, I think of vengeance. I treat my breathing patterns as an illusion of revenge against what it is I am afraid of. It is sort of like having something tear you down—you want to do everything to prove you can stand up again and keep going, right? The first step is to try to control your breathing so that your body can relax. Of course it is always ideal to monitor your breathing patterns from the minute you start whatever it is that you are doing, but because this isn’t always the case, sometimes you have to work twice as hard to return to normalcy in your breathing. Here are several different techniques that I use to regulate my breathing in order to find optimum control.

• Sit with your head in your hands and eyes closed so that you can only focus on your breath. Breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth. I like to count to 7 when you inhale and exhale. Slowly breath in through your nose… 1-2-3–4-5-6-7. Slowly exhale through your mouth… 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Do this for about five to ten minutes to get you relaxed. Do not think about anything during this time except the air and the numbers.

• Lie down or sit in a dark room. This one works well in the evenings before bed, or in a room before training or competition. Similar to above, you want to breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth. This time, when you breathe in, count… 1-2-3-4-5 then hold it for five seconds. Exhale forcefully then hold for five seconds. Repeat until you have calmed down. Once you feel like your breathing is controlled, continue to breath in through your nose, exhaling through your mouth. What I then like to do is relax my whole body. I focus on one body part at a time, my feet all the way to my head. While focusing on the individual part, I repeat to myself, “You are relaxed, you are strong… your feet are relaxed, your feet are strong.” Then I move to my calves, my knees, my quads, my hips, my butt, and so on. Don’t forget to keep your breathing regular! This normally takes about 15 or 20 minutes..

• This is the one I use most often, especially when I am training—Breathe in through your nose slowly for as long as you can then hold it for about five seconds. Exhale as quickly as you can then hold it for about five seconds. While I am breathing in, I am repeating, “Strength, strength, strength,” and while I exhale I repeat, “Relax, relax, relax.”

The above tools will aid in your ability to relax. Please don’t think that mental training starts and ends with breathing—it is one of the fundamentals you need to master before continuing on in training your mind. My breathing techniques may not work for you—alter them until you find something that fits you. That is what I did—I changed, adapted, cried, and screamed myself into a hysterical hyperventilating-type breathing frenzy until I finally found something that worked for me. There is something out there that will work for you—just breathe a lot until you figure it out!

Mr. Miyagi once said, “Wax on, right hand. Wax off, left hand. Wax on, wax off. Breathe in through nose, out the mouth. Wax on, wax off. Don't forget to breathe, very important…” It worked for Daniel-Son, right?

Awareness of our bodies is a crucial part of training and competing. The power of awareness, specifically whole-body awareness, is critical in finding the path of mental, physical and emotional weaknesses and strengths. If you are aware that your breathing patterns are unstable and fluctuate, then you must find the willingness to acknowledge this and fix it before continuing. Your breath is similar to wearing your emotion on your sleeve; it is a huge indicator of the way you are feeling or thinking at any particular moment. Because we identify more closely and easily with our minds and our emotions than with our bodies, we are more inclined to ignore any “mental problems” over physical problems. So, let’s just pretend that those “mental problems” are there, even if we are choosing to ignore them, and practice our breathing. Learn how to calm yourself down so that soon a fifteen-minute breathing exercise only takes two minutes. Teach your body to respond to your breath in ways that benefit your training and everyday life. Let’s not forget that although we often find our minds playing tricks on us, we too can trick our minds.

In the next installment of Mind Freak I am going to assume your are a Master of Breathing and can move on with mental training. With this, I will address one of the greatest lessons I ever learned from James Bauman: “Focusing on the past or future. "I can't believe I just missed that simple lift" (past) or "Now I have to be perfect to win" (future). Not letting go of a mistake or "poor" performance takes our thoughts and focus away from where they need to be—on the present! Physiologically and bio-mechanically these past, present, and future self-conversations clutter up the connection between body and mind. Our body functions in the present only... so our thoughts must align with that time zone (not the past or future)”, and I will discuss in great length Mental Imagery and Preparation. With this, we will also learn about vision, finding the positive, and what works in order to DO IT. Someone in the Tao world once said, “Hold fast to the great image, and all the world will come” (Tao Te Ching).

In Part 4 of Mind Freak, I will be discussing how to avoid and/or deal with athletic injuries. Mentally. The fabulous Dan Millman said “Injury most often results from a fundamental flaw in our talent foundation (of strength, suppleness, stamina, and sensitivity), or from impatience, a lack of attention, or some combination of these. “Accidents” aren’t really accidents… to avoid injuries, you need mental clarity and attention, emotional stability, AND physical preparation. They are the three best insurance policies you’ll ever have- and they don’t cost a cent. Injury is the price paid for insensitivity, impatience, or inattention”.

Unfortunately, I now have learned this the hard way. If I would have only taken his words seriously…