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Coach targets mental game in high-pressure sport
Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Vincent Hancock is a nervous person, who by his own admission simply
cannot keep still.
But when everything was on the line Saturday and he had to hit two
final shots to win the skeet shooting Olympic gold medal, he stepped
up and calmly blew the whizzing disks out of the sky.
How does a jittery 19-year-old kid from Georgia keep cool under the
intense pressure of an Olympic final when everyone around him is
sweating bricks?
That's where Daniel Vitchoff steps in.
"I specialize in hypnosis," said Vitchoff, a performance coach and
sports psychologist hired to work with the U.S. shooting team. "When
you are shooting in the Olympics, it comes down to who can best
perform under extreme pressure. Out there, everybody is as good as
the next person. It's not a physical thing anymore. The difference
between the best and the rest is the mental game."
Shooters must control their emotions yet still maintain their
intensity and concentration. It is especially hard because there is
no physical outlet for all the adrenaline that is building. It is a
recipe for the yips.
"There are guys who shoot perfect scores in practice and then they
fall apart in the competition, " Vitchoff said. "It's like having a
phobia. It gets into their head and tears them apart. A lot of what I
do is teach them to let it go."
That's where the hypnosis comes in. The idea, Vitchoff said, is to
put the athletes into a meditative state by lowering their blood
pressure and heart rate, sometimes with music. Vitchoff then uses
what is essentially the power of suggestion to reinforce positive
thoughts. He said he goes over the relaxation techniques repeatedly
until his subjects are able to reach what he calls the "zone."
"Look at Michael Jordon. When he played, his tongue was out, his jaw
was relaxed. He was in a zone," Vitchoff said.
Another technique is called modeling, in which he takes something the
athlete is struggling with and has him or her watch video over and
over of that particular thing being done successfully.
"In our business, we always say success has a structure," Vitchoff
said. "If you watch success, you can duplicate it."
Eating right and proper exercise are crucial parts of such a regimen,
Vitchoff said. For shooters, he recommends more protein - because
carbohydrates hype you up and then make you crash - and repetitive
exercise like running and biking.
"The stronger your heart, the slower it beats, so if I have to pull
the trigger between heartbeats, I want to work on slowing it down,"
Vitchoff said.
This article appeared on page C - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Hypnosis in the Oympics
Research on Using Hypnosis for Needle Phobia
I am so happy whenever I see research being done on the use of hypnosis for medical procedures or issues. Read and enjoy!!
Brief hypnosis for severe needle phobia using switch--wire imagery in a 5-year old.
Pediatric Anesthesia. 2007 Aug;17(8):800-804.
Cyna AM, Tomkins D, Maddock T, Barker D. Department of Paediatric Anaesthesia, Women's and Children's Hospital, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
We present a case of severe needle phobia in a 5-year-old boy who learned to utilize a self-hypnosis technique to facilitate intravenous (i.v.) cannula placement. He was diagnosed with Bruton's disease at 5 months of age and required monthly intravenous infusions. The boy had received inhalational general anesthesia for i.v. cannulation on 58 occasions. Initially, this was because of difficult venous access but more recently because of severe distress and agitation when approached with a cannula. Oral premedication with midazolam or ketamine proved unsatisfactory and hypnotherapy was therefore considered. Following a 10-min conversational hypnotic induction, he was able to use switch--wire imagery to dissociate sensation and movement in all four limbs in turn. Two days later the boy experienced painless venepuncture without the use of topical local anesthetic cream. There was no movement in the 'switched-off' arm during i.v. cannula placement. This report adds to the increasing body of evidence that hypnosis represents a useful, additional tool that anesthetists may find valuable in everyday practice.