The Science of Sports
Naveen Varshneya
Founder’s Insights • 18 April 2022, 9:00 AM
Performance is not about how good you are, but how you perform within a given time slot and environment. Unless you are totally in that moment, you are not at your best.
All serious students appearing for any competitive examinations such as IIT, CAT or IAS, are at par with each other in terms of their intellect, motivation and hard work, training and practice.
However, the selection of the candidates does not check for the intelligence of the candidates but for their ability to produce their intelligence within the given time and under a high-pressure environment. Sports are not any different but rather far more demanding in terms of the sportspersons’ ability to produce their best within much lesser time than academics and this means integration of all the four bodies (Spiritual, Mental, Emotional and Physical) to work in harmony to deliver through the physical layer.
In a 90-minutes game, Lionel Messi gets the ball on an average about 10 times (on the higher side). Each time, the ball is with him for less than 1 minute. He has a task to score a goal and give his best performance within that time frame. This means that for 90 minutes, he needs his total focus. On the same note, Sachin has the same task while batting for the whole day and he requires the same focus every minute, from when the bowler bowls until he strikes it. In the case of athletics, the demand to excel in a shorter period is even more challenging where they need to win and exhibit their prowess within a few seconds or a few minutes depending upon the sport.
Skills, techniques, and experiences are just tools available to them and sportsperson work best when they can apply their mind intuitively at that moment. Mind and body can be brought in union and can be kept at a constant value throughout the game rather easily.
However, it is the dynamic nature of spirit (emotions) that has a direct impact on the mind and body and that begins to change the power of focus. Hence, by only doing mental and physical training, there will still be gaps that need to be filled by the integrated Spirit-Body-Mind approach.
Sachin’s infamous score ‘99’ is just one such example among many, throughout all sports where the emotional body loses balance with mind and body and it comes up uninvited at a crucial moment in competition breaking away all the resolve existing at mind and body level to win. To create a winner, the emotional body which is running through the subconscious, needs to be in harmony with the mind to allow wholesome power to come into the performance.
Key Challenges for Sports Person:
Ability to produce a performance in seconds and minutes and that too, each time.
Accuracy, precision and consistency require absolute focus and power. A trait found in a Yogi.
To be in a perfect state of balance, at the time of competition, when pressure and expectations are huge.
The Importance of Breathing
Breathing is the only link between mystery and life. It carries the seeds of energy in it and if regulated with awareness, it infuses energy, which transforms into power. For centuries, this secret was known to our Rishis and they used this as art to attain high powers. In Sports, where a player has a task of ‘being total’ in that moment, has a much higher challenge than a Yogi, who has no time pressure. It is this art that is demystified by Curedemy and is converted to a science and then into techniques, which can be passed on to players to enhance their performance.
Breathing is affected by emotions all the time and emotions are triggered by experiences and experiences are created based on belief and belief is a product of the environment. Hence, every person carries baggage from his/her past which does not allow the conscious mind to live in the moment and a great amount of effort is required, all the time, to keep such emotions under control. It requires high mental bandwidth just to manage these emotions; thus, leaving little mind available to focus on the work at hand.
This becomes an inherent limitation for any training to be done at the mind level, as the whole of the mind is not available to be trained to focus on the task at hand. The nature of the emotions is such that they continue to get stored in the subconscious as they continue to flow through our body, thus bringing an inherent error in the infinite potential of breathing. When we train our minds to focus on our performance, we have to work against the subconscious, which is seeking emotional release all the time.
In contrast, take a case of a child prodigy like Sachin and Messi, where they have all the emotions, for their passion for the game and hence their conscious and subconscious are fused and integrated.
To make other players perform in line with a prodigy, it is essentially a task to clear their subconscious and align it with the conscious so that their spirit-body and mind speak the same language which results in absolute focus and power. This is what we teach in our three programs Chetna, Vedna and Manthan, with the help of techniques that we have developed. These techniques, when practised, automatically begin to align the conscious and subconscious for the purpose of life and as that happens, they have no stress or sorrow in practising as they begin to experience bliss in doing so. It is no more a task to perform but the joy of doing it.
Gradually, it is natural to bring defence mechanisms to protect ourselves. Protection of our vulnerabilities is the beginning of creating distance and the creation of distance is starting to believe love shall be explored outside. As we do that, our faith in the relationship dies which we commonly think is a death of love. Search for love never dies, and our capacity to love never dies as a search for love is the search for Identity. If it dies, it creates depression and disorder.
In the last decade, having worked with mental disorder cases, which were given up by every medical stream, we began to apply them to healthy people. As we developed the science, we discovered that no matter who the person is and what the issue is, these techniques when applied can make people vibrate at a higher frequency. So same techniques are by now applied on scores of chronic illnesses, corporate executives, relationship issues and of course on sportspersons. Since it is a science, we work with objectivity and a very high degree of predictable outcome and the results are visible and quantifiable. In the case of sports, results in the performance have been visible within 1 to 3 weeks.
The programs developed and perfected in the last decade, of doing work in the area of mental health has brought credible, predictable results with objectivity. There are enough case studies and testimonials available across various issues of mental health including sports. Besides, our work is such that, one can experience the difference in a short while realizing the power and validity of it.
