How Meditation & Awarness Can Help Roller Derby

When playing roller derby lots of people have to deal with a number of emotions, ether before and during the bout. These exaggerated emotions such as anxiety, stress and anger can cause you to lose focus and not play to the best of your ability. While all emotions are 100% normal, staying focused and calm is key to getting the most out of yourself, as when in states of anger during a game, you are wound up in that anger and you will lose sight of the real goal of working as a team. Being focused, calm and assertive you will be able to calculating every move and minimise mistakes.

Meditation & Awareness is very simple and can be adapted to help you in any situation. I will explain how these can be used before and during a game below:

Before the game: You wake up and its game day and you start to feel anxious about the coming game as its important to you, you feel a little sick and struggle to eat. When feeling this way its important to know this is really normal and most people suffer with this. There is a simple way to relax yourself and this would be to do a breathing meditation or listening meditation to calm yourself. I have covered these meditations in previous blog posts (My first meditation & Listening meditation in the August section) if you wish to see how to do these. These meditations will allow you to relax. If you learn to do this regularly or even if you only do this on game day you will see some benefit, even if it calms you only to allow you to eat well, as this will allow you to have a good solid meal that will keep you alert during the game.

During the game: How often have you been upset angry or just frustrated during a game? I'm sure you are all very passionate about the sport and these kind of emotions are common for any sports player. But how can you calm yourself and stay focused during a game situation? This is where awareness comes in really helpful. When you notice during a game that you are feeling upset, angry or frustrated learn to do an awareness based exercise that takes only a few seconds or minutes. There are any number of ways to do this, but, I will explain one and you can take it and run with it. Trial this technique if you so desire and if it does not help then please don't use it. Simply stare at the floor and bring your focus to your deep breaths and the sensation it is having on your body, just count each circular breath (breathing in, then out being one circular breath). Try not to focus on anything els and this will prevent you running with the anger or frustration. You will notice that this should calm you and allow you to stay focused on the game. These techniques may not work straight away but you should see some level of calmness from the start. The more you do this the better it will get and I'm sure it will improve your game. As I said earlier there are lots of ways to use this awareness technique. Chose any focus object that you can find if the breath isn't helping you. I am using the breath as an example as its easy to find as we all breath.

I hope that this will help all you derby players out there, happy skating.