Mental Conditioning For Athletes

I admit it - I love watching the Olympics. Tonight an NBC announcer said that one Gold Medal winner credits his success to his use of hypnosis.

I searched around for more information on this story and here is what I found:

The winning athlete is 26 year old Australia’s Steve Hooker who set a new Olympic record. Steve learned to use mental conditioning prior to the games.

Apparently, Hooker was so spooked of vaulting he used hypnosis to overcome his fears.

A hypnotherapist reversed Steve Hooker’s fear of pole vaulting a several years ago and his success was visible on Friday when he succeeded in achieving Olympic gold.

After the Athens Olympics five years ago, Hooker started mental conditioning sessions and used hypnotherapy to help overcome his fears. He learned visualization techniques and had imagined himself vaulting in the Bird’s Nest leading into the 2008 Games. “I felt like that kind of stuff was cool.”

Hooker told an Australian news paper that he nearly stopped vaulting in 2001. He threw tantrums in training and was not fully dealing with the mental aspect of the tough discipline.”

“I would run through a lot and not take off and it got to the point, by the end of it I thought about giving it in. It was so mentally draining going to training not knowing if I would be able to jump or not.

“I was throwing poles, cracking tantrums, I was in a miserable bad mood. Your whole life, it really brings it down when it’s really what you want to do and you can’t do it just because it’s not clicking in your brain,” Hooker said.

Hypnotism and visualization techniques brought Hooker back into alignment.

“I would talk to her at the start of the session and say, ‘I want to talk about lowering the pole vault in my last couple of steps and jumping off the ground.’ I would tell her the cues I wanted to work on, so she’d work it into the things that she was saying while I was under hypnosis.”

Hooker said, “The more you do it the more you realize pole vault is mental. Just having any sort of mental stimulation, where you are thinking deeply about what you’re doing, helps.”

“I feel like I have that self confidence now, where I can stand at the end of the runway, I know basically what’s going to happen as soon as I start my run-up,” Hooker said.