Icelandic ChallengeTraining the mind
Training the mind by Lee Whitehead
Athletes are obsessed with increased performance, no matter what sport they participate in: better, faster, stronger, more precise – a continual quest - if you will - to be at the very top of their game, and to beat the competition.
Over the last two decades, sports nutrition has made huge strides in performance by helping the body to cope with increased physical demands, and with the protein powders and BCAAs, there have been performance-enhancing drugs as well. But what if you could actually fine-tune your performance output by training your brain to use the mechanics of your body in a more effective way?
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has been around since the 1970s and has unfortunately been linked ever since to tree-hugging hippies by those who don’t understand its purpose. The reality is that the Army and a vast amount of savvy sportsmen (to name just a few groups) are using its concepts and practitioners to sharpen the application of their skills.
Gary Turner is a K1 and MMA veteran with a sporting background that covers nearly 30 years. He has a collection of martial arts belts and trophies to show that his approach works. More recently he has been working with a host of sportsmen, from boxers to mixed martial artists and even members of the British judo team.
“I first learnt NLP through the Army, and in that environment it’s completely black and white with no mumbo jumbo,” states Turner - further emphasising that they aren’t the kind of audience to be sitting around being fluffy.
“NLP was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who set about learning how certain therapists were getting results when others weren’t. They modelled the way these people worked by looking at their use of language, strategies and patterns, the way their minds were working, and their physiology. And from this, a series of techniques were formed which are still developing to this day. This will allow you to ‘model’ how someone does something and then replicate it for similar results.”
If you think of MMA training, you go to the dojo, get your kit on, do your warm-up routine and then usually start learning new techniques before a period of pressure testing or sparring at the end. It’s all routine in that respect, but in competition, things don’t tend to run as smoothly, and half of those techniques are forgotten or inaccessible.
“Everybody has two minds, the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. The former is able to process 2 million pieces of information per second, but the latter is only able to process 134 pieces per second, grouped into ‘chunks’ of 5-9 pieces of information. So when a fighter is a position where they are thinking about the next move, they are only able to think about 5-9 things at any one time. The aim is to learn how to react to stimulus so they are fighting unconsciously,” explains Turner.
It is easy to understand that humans react instinctively to certain scenarios without consciously thinking about them. For instance, if you touch something too hot, you remove your hand instantly without thinking about it. The same theory applies here.
“Think of it this way,” Turner says, “you may know 500 ways to apply an armbar; but if you can instantly access a specific variation based on the position without even thinking about it then surely that is more effective?”
So how does someone go about tapping into their unconscious mind? To remove the limitations imposed by conscious thought?
“The first thing is to have a meeting and define what they want to achieve or change, identify what’s going wrong and what could be improved,” he explains, before adding that self awareness is the key to making the transition.
“The way to resolving problems would be the setting of appropriate goals, self awareness, identifying their parameters and learning how to re-programme them through the application of linguistics or other interventions – and then putting it into motion.”
NLP isn’t specifically geared towards dealing with physical responses; it also deals with emotional responses. Mental blocks imposed by a fighter when dealing with a set of circumstances, such as anxiety, motivation, apprehension, fear of getting hit, etc.
“Think of it this way,” he points out, “you may use sat nav, or a road map to come to my office the first time, the next time you may be quicker, after that maybe you can do the journey without any guidance and finally you begin to find shortcuts and alter your route to suit, smoothing things out as your confidence grows.” We all understand this analogy, so how does Gary Turner apply his techniques?
“I work using hypnosis, transformational linguistics, and more formal interventions – everything is tailored to the individual. I work to put my fight client into a state of mind which trusts what they know, their conditioning, their techniques and so on, all to improve their performance, and often will ‘anchor’ this state from the moment the gumshield goes in until the moment it comes out.”
“We can work on limitations such as limiting beliefs, fears and negative emotions, through to working on motivation and the fighter’s core values for competing. I also work with the unconscious mind using focused visualisation and time distortion, all with the aim of analysing performance to help re-programme the neurology to deal with things like having earlier and quicker reactions. These of course are only some examples of the work that can be done.”
All of this hinges on the use of linguistics as an influential tool, aiming to create images and feelings that help them understand their behaviour and change it where required. In addition to NLP, Turner also employs the use of Isopraxism, or ‘matching and mirroring’ as it is commonly known, to help influence the way people move when working with them and he can really see the benefits of its application in combat sports.
“When you are fighting,” he points out, “it is very easy to get in tune with another opponent’s movements, that’s when you can match and mirror them to help with your influence over them. This helps with reading muscle reflexes and unconsciously influencing them to respond physically to a certain set of movements – which you can then capitalise upon.”
We are only just scratching the surface of the topic within these pages, but suffice to say; there are real world benefits to the use of NLP techniques in sport, be it combat or otherwise. The issues of fear, anxiety, limiting beliefs, direction, motivation and injury management aren’t discriminatory and can affect anyone.
If you find that you have reached a personal plateau, or have underlying performance based issues or limitations you need to solve, then for a relatively small outlay it is worth investigating.
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