It’s often talked about among younger sports fans about how many big, burly athletes take ballet or dance lessons to improve balance and agility. But not many discuss the rising trend of athletes taking on meditation for improved health, mindset, and athletic ability. Here are a few ways that meditation can help improve your athletic career.

Focus

Meditation is, at it’s core, about focus. Allowing your focus to drift, bringing your focus to a single point, or even just taking a step back and thinking about why you focus on what you focus on. On the field, there are dozens of distractions that pop up throughout your game. The fans, your teammates, the opponents, everything happening around you in a single moment. Having control over your focus can make all of the difference on the field

Pain Tolerance

Pain is a natural part of athletics – no pain no gain, as everybody’s least favorite coach would say. This is something that most athletes expect, but not all can deal with. Recently, a study has shown that meditation can reduce how sensitive a person is to pain. After attending meditation sessions, participants rated the pain to be about as half as bad as they had first rated it. Athletics can be very painful and dealing with that pain in a healthy and positive manner is key to staying ahead.

Better Sleep

Sleep is the most important part of keeping healthy, and is critical to recovery from hard workouts. Meditation has long been known to help improve sleep, thanks to a better ability to let the mind rest. Meditation also works as a relaxation technique, which cuts back on stress and improves their bed-time mindset. This stress reduction alone makes meditation a huge help to career athletes, and athletes at all levels otherwise.

Healthier Body

Meditation also helps improve your immune system. It’s been shown that meditation can help prevent respiratory infections and other breathing illnesses. It also showed that meditation could help reduce the severity of illness as well. Breath control is a major part of many meditation routines, and is essential to maximized performance on the field. By adding in a bit of meditation and bodily awareness, not only could you be preparing your body for the field, but you could catch any changes earlier, preparing you to fight of an illness before anybody else is aware you have one.

Meditation has been shown to have multiple benefits for decades. Athletes that take on the practice can clearly have an edge on others who haven’t practiced meditation. And as we progress more and more in our understanding of the human body and what is important to a well-functioning athlete, we need to understand what others have already known – Working meditation into your schedule can be a help to all parts of your body – and life.