Training Athletes From The Inside Out: Yoga and Mindfulness Lesson Plans to Reduce Stress and Enhance Performance

This book will provide the reader with fifteen mini lessons to use once a week with his/her team either before or after a practice to increase self-awareness and encourage self-regulation of athletes’ emotions. The lessons will consist of a fifteen to twenty-minute yoga session, a tip of the day, a focus/strategy of the day that will help reduce stress, and a five to ten-minute mindfulness exercise. I have also included sport-specific visualization scripts that can be used before games to help athletes increase their focus, positivity, and confidence going into a game. Yoga will help athletes learn to move with their breath to create a mind-body connection, enhance their flexibility and strength, and achieve ultimate health and relaxation. Mindfulness will help athletes become more self-aware, have improved attention & focus, and have better emotional regulation in their everyday life. It is all about learning how the mind works and how to retrain it to think more positively. As we have all heard, Sports are 90% mental and 10% physical (Meggyesy, 2016). That is why it is imperative that we not only train our bodies, but we train our minds as well. When athletes can use both yoga and mindfulness together, they will find they have an increased ability to identify, express, and regulate their emotions in a healthy way. This internal awareness will help them create a more productive life and achieve greater focus while performing their sport.