The next time you're faced with a high-pressure situation in sport, try squeezing your left fist tight for thirty seconds. According to a team of German sports psychologists, doing so will activate your right hemisphere, aiding automatic, skilled performance and preventing choking under pressure, which they say is linked with left-hemisphere activity and conscious deliberation.
Jurgen Beckmann and his colleagues tested their intervention across three studies. In the first, 30 semi-professional footballers aimed penalty kicks at holes in a wall. They did this in a low-pressure situation then competitively in front of a crowd. The fist squeezing was described to participants as a way to boost concentration. Kickers who squeezed a soft ball in their right fist for thirty seconds prior to the high-pressure situation choked - their performance dipped compared with the no pressure situation. By contrast, the competitors who squeezed their left fist showed no evidence of choking.
Click on the link below to read the full article
Category(s):Sports Psychology
Source material from The British Psychological Society
