By Joe Dana
Somewhere between his fears and the end of an aluminum bat senior baseball player Shane Belliston found peace.
The junior stand-out, accustomed to slapping hits all over the field, was fearing every at-bat and playing a less than mediocre season.
Then Belliston played the invisible game. He stopped analyzing the elbow, the batting stance and the foot placement, and started thinking about, well, his thinking. Through visualization, meditation, and benching his mind, Belliston learned to play the game no fan or opponent could see.
“I hit it as hard as I could hit a ball,” Belliston said, recalling the game he caught “the feeling” as he puts it and renewed his season. The sweet-swinging junior batted .500 the last 15 games, a dream-like streak.
Anyone who plays sports has used the terms: They found the groove, they were in the zone, they let the game come to them. Whatever its label, psychologists make serious attempts to define it and learn its curious nature so that “the zone” applies to not only sports, but to professions off the field.
The Zen of sports
“I could do anything in that box,” Belliston said, recalling his last 15 games.
The box. A chalked outline in the dirt aligned with home plate. But just the same, perhaps “the box” is as good as any word to describe what many accomplished athletes enter, a dimension of perfect competitive harmony.
“When you find that,” said Gershen Tenenbaum, president of the International Society of Sport Psychology, “you want to find it again.”
Some call the feeling “the Zen of sports.” Psychologists seem to hesitate to give it spiritual reference. “This is not superstition,” said one psychologist with adamancy. But nevertheless, most athletes and psychologists say there is a transcendental quality of “the zone” that supercedes science rhetoric.
“You can’t make it happen, you have to let it happen,” said Professor Dan Gould of the University of North Carolina, a researcher of Olympic athletes’ mental approach to sport.
And athletes at the top of their games seem to give it a mystical make-up as well. Two Olympian gold medal winners say they rely heavily on spiritual meditation to reach their peak performance. Another, according to Gould, uses principles of religious meditation from the western world.
Cameron McCoy, a BYU track and field de-cathalete from Washington DC, said most of his success resonates from within.
“The spirit is what drives me. The heart gives me desire. The mind tells me what to do,” McCoy said. “And hopefully the body delivers.” But what is he actually thinking in the moments before the race?
“Nothing,” McCoy said.
Psychologists say that is often the mark of peak performance. Indeed, for many athletes who are taught to channel all of their brainpower into winning, sometimes thoughts just get in the way.
Ten of the most accomplished Olympians in the U.S. all revealed a key trait, “their ability to focus, to laser in and block everything out,” said Gould.
Some of BYU’s top athletes say the zone is an eclectic search. They say finding the zone is about mind power, yet the mind must be clear of thoughts. It is about being composed, yet emotions are vital. It is about instinct in the moment, yet it requires daily practice.
The path to competitive euphoria
“It’s not that easy to just say don’t think negative thoughts,” said Robert Weinberg, co-writer of Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology, a textbook on the mental approach to sports.
Rather, it seems that finding the zone involves elements of meditation, visualization and relaxation. And practice.
Weinberg laughs at coaches who tell their players to “just relax” in the clutch moments of a game.
“You have to practice relaxing,” Weinberg said. “And the same applies for life. The skills to focus can benefit anyone, but only if they practice them.”
That is why many coaches and psychologists stress relaxation and visualization techniques. BYU sports psychologist Ron Chamberlain teaches his classroom of BYU athletes how to visualize the “biggest game of your life.” Class time ends with a practice in visualization: students sprawl on the floor with the lights out and soft music.
“He tells us to relax our cheeks, face, mouth, neck, shoulders, arms, everything,” Belliston said. Then Belliston and his classmates play a running highlight film in the mind. Everything is imagined, from tying the laces of dirty cleats in the locker room to hearing the roar of fans after a touchdown.
“It’s amazing to me how powerful imagery is. It’s so simple, but often overlooked,” Chamberlain said.
For others, reaching the zone means getting hyped, or hitting “the arousal of emotion” according to Tenenbaum.
“They all have their own recipe of emotions to get to a certain level,” Gould said. “Athletes need to find the path that is right for them.”
One snow skier uses intense imagery of every turn on the slope before the race begins, and another “tells jokes at the top of the hill, then focuses in the last ninety seconds like there is no tomorrow,” Gould said.
Off the playground and in life
Tenenbaum applies the study of what he calls “the zone of optimal functioning” to musicians, surgeons, even astronauts.
He teamed up with a group of scientists at FSU to create the Laboratory for the Study of Expert Performance.
“Each of us, whatever task we are doing, we have bad days and we have good days. The question is what emotional state you are in when performing your best,” Tenenbaum said.
Belliston said the zone found in a second’s fraction of a baseball pitch is applicable to everything.
“It might be funny because it’s a game, but the principals are the same,” Belliston said. “Eventually it will happen if you believe.”
McCoy uses the principals of preparation and visualization from the track for finals.
“It’s about going to class everyday, preparing yourself, and envisioning success,” McCoy said.
Gould hopes to use his research to better equip elementary students.
“If we find out what allows those people (Olympic athletes) to be so good, then we teach it to kids to use it in other ways,” Gould said. “We have to make that transfer.”
