Meditation for Athletes

Meditation is a scientific approach to training the mind. This mental training aims to enhance essential psychological skills like attention, body awareness, emotion regulation, and self-perception. These skills are crucial for athletes to train effectively, achieve peak performance in competitions, and recover optimally.

Studies show that meditation changes brain structure and activity, improving cognitive and physical performance. Regular practice sharpens attention, deepens body awareness, optimizes emotional management, and strengthens self-perception. These skills need to be individually balanced to perform at your best in sports.

While profound changes require long-term practice, improvements are noticeable after just a few hours of meditation. You don’t need to retreat for months; effective training can be immediately integrated into your daily life. Here is my kickstart program for athletes’ meditation.

Meditation comes in many forms, but they all share one commonality: maintaining a conscious intention, whether it’s focusing on the breath or another meditation object. Whenever our mind wanders into thoughts, associations, or emotions, we learn to recognize this and bring our awareness back without judgment. We observe how thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations arise and pass away.

Meditation is about forming and maintaining specific conscious intentions. Repeated intentions over many practice sessions lead to frequently repeated mental actions, which eventually become mental habits. Intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become mental habits.

This may sound simple, but it touches the fundamental mechanisms of our consciousness: You will recognize hidden aspects of yourself, such as the difficulty of staying focused, how easily thoughts carry your mind away, how strongly emotions are tied to sensations, and how quickly automatic behavior patterns can be triggered. Meditation teaches general principles about how perception and response work. It can be eye-opening to see your mind in action from an objective observer’s perspective. From now on, your meditation practice will be your personal mental laboratory where you conduct experiments and observe. Initially, the practice is quite formal. Just consider it as practicing a new technique. This must also be practiced in isolation but can then quickly be integrated into familiar behaviors.

To train this technique, start with the right posture. Sit still, upright, and comfortably. Keep your spine in its natural curvature. Place your hands on your thighs and relax your arms and shoulders. All facial muscles should be relaxed. Let your gaze rest about a meter in front of you.

Generally, any stable sitting posture where the upper body is upright and the body can relax is suitable for meditation. The most popular meditation posture is probably sitting on the floor on a round cushion with crossed legs, tucking the ankles slightly under the thighs or knees. Alternatively, both knees and shins can lie flat on the floor, one in front of the other. In all positions, both knees should touch the ground and, along with the sit bones, form a stable foundation for a straight, naturally upright spine. If these positions are not possible for any reason, benches or a chair can be used, or lying flat on the floor if necessary.

It’s worth noting that these positions are also unfamiliar for flexible individuals and can initially lead to tension and pain during practice. This is not unusual and will quickly subside with some practice.

The first obstacle in meditation is the short attention span. The mind usually lacks the strength to concentrate for more than a few moments. Therefore, we need a meditation object – a mental anchor that focuses and stabilizes our attention.

In sports and generally, rhythmic structures are ideal meditation objects. One of the most basic and effective techniques is focusing on the breath. Breathe slowly – ideally at a frequency of 5-6 breaths per minute – and through the nose. Relax your muscles, especially in the upper body, so you can breathe deeply through the abdomen. Direct your mind away from current thoughts or worries and consciously focus on the breath. This means paying attention to the sensations caused by breathing, such as temperature, pressure, and air movement on the skin. It’s recommended to use the nose as the nerve endings there are more sensitive than in the chest or abdomen. Particularly the area around the nostrils is well-suited. Locate the spot where the sensations are most pronounced. From now on, the sensation of the breath at the tip of your nose will be your primary meditation object.

Our intention during this practice is to concentrate on a meditation object. Maintain this attention and return to it whenever you drift away.

Meditation looks simple, and that’s where the challenge lies. Here is a basic guide to experience the principles of meditation yourself:

• Focus on the Meditation Object: Concentrate on the sensations of the breath at the nose. This means perceiving the air movements in and out of the nostrils. Attention to the breath simply means being attentive. Try to direct 100% of your mental energy to this mental anchor. Focusing on the breath does not mean thinking about it but consciously perceiving the feeling of each inhale and exhale.
• Open Awareness: Once your attention is stabilized, maintain a peripheral awareness in the background. Do not limit this by intensely focusing on the breath and blocking everything else out. Mindfulness is the optimal balance between attention and awareness. Allow sounds, sensations, thoughts, memories, and feelings to continue in the background. A good ratio would be to direct 70% of your mental energy to the meditation object and 30% to peripheral awareness. If you maintain this awareness, you will notice potential distractions as they arise, and attention is less likely to drift away.
• Create Distance: Acknowledge the validity of whatever arises (e.g., thoughts, discomfort, emotions), even if you don’t know their origin. Let it be there without analyzing or judging it while cultivating the perspective of an objective observer. Accept it as a manifestation of a hidden part of yourself. This creates something called psychological distance. When we take a distanced perspective, our view of the world expands. We can let go of emotionality and see it for what it is instead of getting caught in a negative cycle.
• Refocus: Thought wandering is natural, so it is completely normal to lose your focus and sink into thoughts. Appreciate the moment when you notice it and slowly bring your attention back to the meditation object.

Through continuous and repeated returning of the mind to the meditation object, we create stability and mental strength. As in sports, frequency and repetition help build the foundation. Once we have developed the ability to pay attention to the breath, our ability to concentrate on any other object or task is strengthened; we remain consciously attentive to what is important and are less distracted by it.

Remember: The only bad practice session is the one you didn’t do. Meditation means recognizing thoughts as thoughts. At the beginning of meditation, it is often the case that it becomes even more difficult to stay focused without losing yourself in thoughts because you learn how active your brain networks are working in the background. This is completely normal and should motivate you because you realize you are on the path to transformative change.

Exercises help make the meditation steps more varied and effective. Here are four proven exercises I want to introduce to you:

• Counting Your Breaths: A good method to stabilize attention is to count your breaths. Give your mind a task that requires awareness as it is not used to doing nothing. The goal is to reach ten cycles, where the beginning of exhalation marks the start of the cycle. If you often have to start over without reaching ten, slightly reduce the goal. Once you have reached your goal, continue to observe the breathing sensations but stop counting. Counting quickly becomes automatic, and you can forget about the breath and let your thoughts wander while you continue counting. Therefore, counting beyond ten breaths is of little value. The rule is: no more than ten, no less than five.
• Screening to Early Detect Distractions: Your subconscious filters an enormous amount of information and regularly selects something it considers relevant, presenting it to your consciousness. This is the moment when it competes for your attention. From time to time, direct your attention away from the breath for a few seconds and take a quick “screenshot” of what is happening in your awareness field. Screening for potential distractions is an effective method to recognize them early before your mind wanders off.
• Labeling in Dealing with Distractions: Over time, you will get better at recognizing situations where something captures your mind. However, your awareness is probably not strong enough to fully identify and let go of the distraction once you notice you are no longer focused on the breath. To create distance from these distracting activities such as thinking, planning, worrying, fantasizing, or remembering, simply label these activities neutrally. Avoid analyzing the distraction as this only leads to more distraction. Once you have labeled the distraction, bring your attention back to the breath.
• Celebrate the Moment of Wandering: When you suddenly notice that you are no longer observing the breath, take a moment to appreciate this fact. Rejoice that you remembered your intention to meditate. The tendency is to judge oneself and be disappointed because one has lost focus, but this is counterproductive. Thought wandering is natural, so it doesn’t matter that you lost your focus. The act of remembering and returning to meditation is the magical moment.

Continuity, as in any athletic training, is a central element to achieving progress. Without the necessary framework conditions, this is hardly possible. Experts worldwide agree: To develop a robust practice, the following steps are crucial: Finding time (daily time slots for formal training), creating space (making space for practice), integrating practice into daily life (avoiding the separation of training and everyday life), and showing commitment (setting challenging but realistic goals).

The biggest challenge is finding time for practice. A perceived lack of time is the most common reason why training stops. In our connected world, we often feel that we never have enough time for everything. A conscious prioritization, such as the daily goal of training, can help. Find a time that works best for you and protect this time slot. For many, the early morning is ideal as the hustle and bustle of the day has not yet begun. However, choose a time when you are awake and rested to achieve the best results. Start with short exercises of 10 minutes and increase by 5 minutes each week until you reach 25 minutes. This is an ideal length for a meditation session.

Especially at the beginning of meditation practice, a quiet environment is helpful. Find a place that is as free from distractions as possible and where you can practice undisturbed. Take precautions to avoid disturbances, especially from mobile phones – ideally, place them in another room.

An important aspect is integrating formal training into daily life. Everything you do throughout the day can be used as a setting for conscious, albeit short, exercises. For example, incorporate the described exercises before and after your training sessions. You don’t have to formally meditate – sitting or lying down is enough. Find ways to fit meditative exercises into your training scheme. The goal is to embed the new skills so deeply into the subconscious that they can be automatically retrieved in stressful situations. Your physical training represents the real world with all its complexities, so it is important to combine this with mental training early on and avoid separating training from everyday life. This is what we refer to as hybrid training.

As an athlete, you know: True progress and transformation require hard work. Many seek quick solutions, but genuine mental training takes time and effort. The meditation practice is both simple and incredibly challenging as it requires high motivation. Developing a habit that becomes a firm routine is crucial. Small consistent actions lead to great results over time. Your own progress will eventually become the greatest motivation.