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Peak Performance? Effortless? Enjoyable? You Are In The Zone
The way to a peak performance is to train smarter! Can We Train To Get in The Zone?Yes, I believe you can by developing your skills of focus and awareness. In fact, from my own studies and from working with athletes I see it as training to allow ourselves to drift in to it.
My book Zone Mind, Zone Body contains my research, theories and practical techniques. It will not only show you what the 'unknown factor' is, but how you can take control to your advantage. You are welcome to search inside my book and find out what is stopping you getting into The Zone and reaching your true potential. Please click here to open Amazon's online reader in a new window. The Ultimate Sporting ExperienceHave you ever attempted to perform a simple act and completely failed? From completely mistiming a shot to losing balance at a crucial moment, the outcome may have fallen short of our intention and expectation. In contrast there are times when everything goes just right, every act is carried out to perfection with little perceived effort. Why should this be the case? If you are capable of achieving feats of brilliance one moment, why do you fail so comprehensively the next? What condition is present one moment and gone the next? Athletes refer to the later as ‘The Zone ’ and spend their lives trying to reach this subliminal level.The elusiveness of The Zone gives us a clue into its nature. Athletes experiencing these moments cannot explain how they came to be there, and report that the state is lost as soon as they become aware of being in it. From their observations it appears that ‘being in The Zone’ involves integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of movement, that is the voluntary decision to act and the reflex that facilitates the action. Becoming conscious of the moment seems to destroy it. A comparable situation is the act of falling asleep, as soon as you become aware you are about to fall asleep you interrupt the process. You cannot do anything to directly make yourself fall asleep. All you can do is to stop doing what may be preventing the process. At an early age I learnt you do not fall asleep any quicker on Christmas Eve by closing you eyes tighter. The Zone is described in a paper titled: The Achievement Zone as: - ... a special place where performance is exceptional and consistent, automatic and flowing. An athlete is able to ignore all the pressures and let his or her body deliver the performance that has been learned so well. Competition is fun and exciting. (Murphy, 1996) Sport Psychologist, Kenneth Ravizza, conducted one of the first studies in 1977 called: ‘A subjective study of the athlete's greatest moment in sport’. He studied the experiences of twenty top athletes during their moments of glory and found that the experience was: - … temporary and of relatively short duration; non-voluntary and not induced at will; and unique. He found that it required many years of practice before they could enter The Zone. He defines the common characteristics of the experience as: - Could being in The Zone involve a state of non-interference with movement? A balanced state promoting integration of postural reflexes, consciousness and appropriate use of learnt patterns. This could explain why it often take years before it is experienced. Unfortunately because you are unaware of how you interfere with your natural mechanisms, time spent there is rare and brief. If you learn to first identify what it is you do to interfere, and then how to prevent it, you may increase your chances of making The Zone.
Can sports psychology enhance my performance? Your biggest hurdle to a peak performance is an invisible one. Not because it hidden from view, in fact, you can’t see it because you are too close to it, it’s right in front of your nose, or to be accurate, behind your nose. Running in The Zone: a personal account Few sporting experiences can compare to running in The Zone. Here is a short story of one such moment. Take your cricket to a higher level If you want to play cricket in The Zone you could learn a lesson from the best. What did Greg Chappell discover when he studied the game's greatest players? What can I do to become a regular Zoner? The harder you try the less likely you will find yourself performing at your peak. So how can you improve your chances of reaching this sporting pinnacle? What the sporting greats say about performance Sports quotes to motivate, amuse and provoke. Achieving peak performance Martial Arts, the mind and the body New Book on The Zone
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