Prep Baseball Report Minnesota is excited to team up with- The Mindstrong Project. Our goal in this endeavor is to continue to provide the most up-to-date pertinent information and resources to the baseball community in the state of Minnesota.

Periodically, The Mindstrong Project will be providing content for the Prep Baseball Report Minnesota website; as they continue to work to build human performance through education while building an awareness of how the mind and body work together to sustain a consistent confident approach to game performance.

In this month's installment; The MindStrong Project talks about- Breathing.

Why Breathing?

Anyone that comes to the Mindstrong Project team will quickly realize we’re going to utilize the breath. It is a massive staple to our coaching and why we do what we do. The foundation of anything we do can always be tailored back to the breath. It is our lowest hanging fruit and the remote to the brain. A few months back, we touched on some in-game tactics to use within breath work and the indications of panic or nervousness from your vision or breath. You can use the breath to check in with your body and mind and have a higher level of awareness and understanding of what you’re at both mentally and physically. What is crucial to understand is that the breath is always happening whether you’re conscious or not of the movement and flow of your breath, it is happening.

This tool that needs to be a focus for any high performer works as a strong staple of trust and confidence when it plays a role in your performance. When situations arise what tools will you trust? If the breath is one of your answers, well why?

Go back a few months and think over the “Stimulus-Choice-Reaction” section that we spoke on. The choice is essentially our breath. It is the moment before we react and the breath is our main source of opportunity to create the best possible reaction moving forward optimally. Most people breathe 13, 15, 17 or as many as 22 or more times a minute. Even when they sit quietly people will have a high respiration rate. Whereas a respiration rate should be around six to ten times a minute. Can this be bad? Yes…

You can look up many negative effects of over-breathing, but for this specific piece, we’re going to focus on the brain. Since most of you have come to us for mental game training we will explain what is happening if you’re not able to understand or control your breath. The “Neocortex” is the part of the brain that distinguishes humans from other animals. We use it to analyze and calculate as well as our language center. This also plays a role in how we worry about will happen in a few weeks or allow us to feel guilty about the past. If we know peak performance happens at the moment, we must not allow guilt from the past or fear of the future to play a role in our physiology.

This neocortex filters external stimuli. Some research has shown that we’re exposed too much external stimuli in one day as someone living in the Middle Ages encountered during a lifetime. We make an average of 2,800 choices each day, every day. Over-stimulated neocortex makes us breathe faster. This turns into a higher respiration rate. But if you can also use this analytical and calculated part of our brain to slow down our breath. How can you do this?

Take two minutes before you start your day, class, practice or game and breathe in through your nose and breathe out through your nose followed by a pause. During this time feel your belly raise first and just a slight rise in your chest. Feel your rib cage go wide and allow your diaphragm to massage your organs. Typically we have our athletes breathe in for counts of four seconds followed by four seconds exhale and a slight two-second pause. For a total of two minutes, this gives you a low respiration rate and mental clarity to create space before you become reactive to external stimuli. If you don’t find relaxation going out through your nose then shift to blowing out through your mouth. Make sure to keep the inhales through the nose.

Hope this helps and gives you a sense of understanding of what your brain is doing throughout the day. Find times of peace and stillness to avoid a massive amount of stimuli in your day. In the game of baseball specifically, you will have an entire event that remains outside of your control. If you don’t have the tools to control your reactions to these stimuli, you will see a massive decrease in your ability to consistently perform at a high level. Start small by counting your own respiration rate for 60 seconds while you’re relaxing and practice calm, slow and controlled breathing. Do this outside of competition to build an understanding of your breath and clarity of mind and take the in-game breathing with you into the competition.

You can find more on respiration rate from the methods of Konstantin Buteyko (1923-2003) and Stans van der Poel (Dutch). Wim Hof also is known as the Iceman is a great leader in the industry of breath and human performance. These names are easily accessible on the web.

If you have any interest in learning more about breath work and how to implement that into your game reach out to us and we would love to dive in deeper.

 

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