Jiu-Jitsu is just as much of a mental battle as it is a physical battle, if not more. You are not only facing your opponent in a mental game, you are also facing yourself in one too. You have to deal with this stress before, during, and after all of your matches. Constant questions that floating in your mind keep coming up. Who is in my division? Who will I go against first? How should I start the match? The thoughts keep popping up with the questions. I hope I don’t lose. I hope I don’t get hurt. So why don’t we focus on training the mind just like we do our bodies when training?
We have all been there where we go out to a tournament, or maybe just a day of training where we just weren’t there mentally, and we psyche ourselves out of knowing how good we truly are. You can’t help those thoughts from coming in from time to time, but there are ways to not let them affect your confidence as you step onto the mats. It is all about how you perceive these thoughts. Thoughts are just that. They aren’t real, but there is a tendency to talk ourselves into believing they are, and this will always affect your performance.
Most of the time, we burn out mentally before we do physically. We tell ourselves we are tired or not good enough to win this tournament. It is just as important to train yourself mentally as it is physically because of this, and you can do this many ways. You can push yourself mentally in practice by training hard, but sometimes that always doesn’t work on your mental focus before your matches.
I am going to get a little deep on you guys, so hold on. Meditation is something that will contribute to your Jiu-Jitsu game, and life in general. I have never been so calm going into matches after practicing meditation, and this will not only save mental energy, but it will help save physical energy too! Meditation rewires your brain to perceive things in a different way by redirecting the blood flow while keeping it in more of an Alpha wave length (calm & focused). If you don’t believe me, there is scientific research to back it up now. Give it a try! Let me know if you have questions getting started!
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