Life revolves around Rules of Three. We survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Some players never achieve the ability to take a breath, refocus, and execute.
When confronted with a resuscitation emergency, doctors think ABC - airway, breathing, circulation.
You've all heard, "that sucked the air out of the room," an event that changed everything. Players and coaches take a breath to move on. Figuratively, taking a breath allows the athlete to center herself before taking the free throw, striking the putt, making the pitch when the game is on the line.
Assuming expansive (power) poses and using mindfulness (e.g. mindful breathing) changes our physiology. Power poses reduce our stress hormone levels (e.g. cortisol) and increase testosterone. Mindful breathing slows heart rate, lowers blood pressure, and over time also reduces stress hormones.
Successful players master their sport but critically master themselves. We see 'breakdowns' when players "lose their mechanics" often reflected by rushing. In basketball we see players force shots, fail to wait for screens, make passes before plays develop, and so on. All ultimately express failure of self-control.
Proper breathing helps players enter a "flow state" allowing high performance. And flow occurs by changing the content of our consciousness.
The video is worth the five minutes of your life.
Teach ourselves and players how to use breathing. I teach players to take and release a breath as part of their free throw preshot routine. Breathing is part of Jason Selk's (Ten-Minute Toughness) program beginning with the "Centering Breath." A simpler version is "square breathing" with a four-second square of breath in, breath hold, breath out, and breath hold of four seconds apiece (easy to remember).
The dot B icon reminds us to "stop and take a breath" symbolizing our ability at self-control and high performance. Very few people take even ONE relaxing, focused breath daily.
Meng Tan writes, "The ability to think calmly under fire is a hallmark of great leadership."
In coaching and in life, we build a "self-help" schema. I'm borrowing from Will Wright (above). At the top, the "player" onion skins layers of experience in game play. This combines their individual accumulation of success and failure (x-axis) and its synthesis within team play (y-axis). The player builds a "world" over years.
In Heads Up Baseball, Dr. Tom Hanson writes:
CAREER = TODAY + TODAY + TODAY + TODAY ...
Take a breath.
Lagniappe 1:
Lagniappe 2:Thought of the Day:— USU Men's Hoops (@USUBasketball) October 17, 2016
Defense is to basketball, as breathing is to life: Defend or Die.@CoachLWilson
Save a life. Discourage your children and players from swimming underwater and seeing how far they can go. I won't get into detailed respiratory physiology beyond saying that accumulation of carbon dioxide partly determines when a breath hold breaks. Hyperventilating before underwater swimming allows longer time, but during that time your oxygen level can fall to a critical level (passing out) under water. That means drowning. Extinction. Take a breath.
