For any sportsmen, the focus is the key to performance; if you as an athlete fail to deliver, it could be because you are lacking a key power to excel at your trade and that power is ‘concentration.’
Players like Ichiro Suzuki tried to keep his nerves intact during the game by writing “Concentration” on his glove to constantly remind himself to focus, but it may vary from player to player, you just need to be headstrong enough to be doing your bits to pull things together.
- YOGA is the best antidote to the mind of somebody who is stressed. It helps you debug, concentrate and clog the way towards over thinking and intermittent loops of thought.
- OUTDOOR GAMES help in distracting the mind to a tangent where our minds learn newer ways to deal with problems and solutions. Games like golf, archeries or dart boards take a lot of concentration because a lot of it is in building up a precision, and that develops the power of observation, patience and of course focus.
- RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY is always good in terms of breaks and recesses between hectic schedules. From gaming to dancing everything should have a routine of fall out otherwise things might be too drab and stressful for the brain to function properly. While the body is active for something at the end of which you do not expect a reward or fear a failure, you certainly tend to unwind and recreate.
- MIND TOUGHENING GAMES are simple tricks to supercharge your brain within seconds. An easy way to do so is focussing on tiny unimportant objects out of daily life, maybe a spoon or a safety pin. Think of its evolution, create a story around its lineage and utilities, how would life be if it had not been there, will there will be another invention, will it have the same colour, shape or utility. Observe, and dive into deep in a world which is unrelated to the world of activities you are part of currently!
- CLEAN CACHE memories as soon as possible. Athletes lose out often due to a heavy processing of information that their body goes through. There is a lot of technicalities that involve a gameplay and everything has to be in a balance and ideal, from diet to the nuances of the rules etcetera. Athletes should just try and remove all the unused bits and bytes from their temporary memory and start focussing on the pressing issues that actually matter.
- UNWIRE from social media and delve into a meditative space where no stimuli can invoke a reaction which is unwanted and untoward. The lesser an athlete gets affected by the articles and the gossips written about him in the media the better it is.
Conclusion:
Concentration comes hand in hand with many other things like “determination” and “grit” and “will” to deliver. As an athlete one should be ready to fail and spiral down to the teeth and be prepared to rise up like the phoenix does from ashes.
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