Train your mind to train your body

  Often we wonder how cool our favourite sports stars are. We are amazed at not only their sheer talent, but their style and that oomph factor. We love to see them play, win, we love to hear them speak about themselves. We are curious to know what they do when they are not competing. Can we try and emulate their style and habits and see what comes up for us? Will it really have any effect on us? What can we expect? Young budding athletes often think of their favourite athlete as though they have come from a different planet. Ask tennis fans about Roger Federer and most will have the opinion that he was born to be a star. We often think top ranked athletes as, “they are there, and we are here” and there is no way we can get even close to that level. No doubt, they have reached there because of hard work and talent and we can close on that gap by working hard.   But there is something more we can do to get that tiny bit closer to them. Your favourite athlete has that style, ch...

A coach has a huge impact on an athlete’s life. If the athlete is a child, chances are that he listens more to his coach than to his own parents. Choosing the right coach with a right attitude for those early sporting days for your child is extremely important. The coach will have visible effects on not only to your child’s sporting skills, but his overall personality. He will teach your child on how to be a good human being. So, what are the qualities which we should watch out for in a coach, what are the must haves? Let me give a few pointers for parents to help them take that decision. According to me, when starting a sport there are three qualities which a good coach must possess- 1) Walks the talk Your child will look up to his coach for almost everything. The way he talks, behaves, plays, eats, drinks, everything. For the child, his coach is nothing less than a superhero. If I want my student to follow something, I do not always say it to him. I just do it myself and the child le...

Training the mind is as important as physical training. Meditation is an extremely important tool for training the mind. Why should we meditate? Where do we start? Let us find out…. Why meditation? Most of the athletes I know, especially teen athletes work very hard in physical training, but devote no  time to train their minds . Professional players have full time sports psychologists at their disposal but most of us and especially kids cannot afford that privilege. Also for kids, the coach is usually too busy training a big group so he hardly has the time to attend to every child and his problems personally. Growth spurt and hormonal changes in kids make them very vulnerable to negative influences, emotions and beliefs and hence it becomes extremely important to  channelize all the energy  in the right direction. Hence mental training is important for an athlete to becoming  calmer, stronger and tougher  on the match field. Meditation is the simplest and one o...

As the government relaxes the lock down, it seems we will finally get to play our favourite sport again. After a gap of nearly five months, how will our mind and body take to our sport again? What will be the challenges? Let us find out. Most of us have never been away from our sport for such a long period. What should we expect and what not to expect when we start?  How should we approach our practice? There are few important factors to be considered before stepping into the field again. The Fear Factor Your sporting field is where you express yourself freely. Last few months have been scary. We all have lived in fear. Many are still unsure if going to play would be a safe choice. With fear in your mind,  practice will not have quality . If you have very rarely stepped out of the house in the last few months, you should take time to start off. Being mentally comfortable, accepting the current situation is very important before starting to play. Anxiety can lead to negati...

The great Buddha had said, "Rule your mind or it will rule you" Discipline comes with understanding your mind. Read on to find out how. We all know that knowledge of something alone does not make us disciplined enough to follow it regularly. Even motivation helps us get a good start, but with time even motivation dries up and the same habit which was driven by motivation in the beginning, after few days becomes a daunting task. In our last blog we discussed "hacks" we can use to exercise regularly. Let us take the same example forward to understand discipline as without discipline, we can forget about persisting anything for a long time.  Watch my video on this topic by going to the link below- How the mind plays us? Let us first see what is common in all individuals. We all get loud inner mind chatter when we are about to begin our workouts. Let me give an example of myself. As a club level player and a coach, I always strive to improve my squash. I design my worko...

During this period of the Corona virus pandemic, I have spoken to many friends, students and fellow coaches. The primary complain they have from the situation as regards to their fitness is that, “there is just no motivation. So it’s very difficult to maintain regularity in exercising.” Well, that’s absolutely correct. There is no tournament coming up, no one to compete with and restrictions in moving out of the house. The uncertainty of the situation adds to the problem.  No one knows when we will be able to compete in a tournament next. It’s been well over three months since squash courts have been closed and keeping the motivation on over such a long period is becoming increasingly difficult. In such a situation, how do we continue to drive ourselves to do that very important work out every day and continue to be in a minimum acceptable shape? Here are a few tips which you can use to motivate yourself to exercise- . Get a personal fitness coach - This is the easiest way to motiv...

All of us are itching to get back to the squash courts post the corona virus pandemic. Most of us have never stayed away from the game since the time we started playing. We all know how addictive the game is, so it’s natural to miss all the action. But there are many athletes, especially young teens that may be getting into depression as their daily routine revolved so much around squash training and the courts. They ate, drank and slept squash. I happen to speak to a 14 year old squash enthusiast whose mother was upset that he was missing squash “badly”. I asked him what he was missing the most. And he replied that he was missing his training. Well, do we really have to MISS training during this time? Does squash training only mean doing drills and fitness inside the court? We all know that’s not the case. There are multiple aspects to training and unfortunately, most of these aspects are largely ignored during our regular “intense” training programs. So how do we keep our train...