Sport Performance and Mental Training

Preface
In the role of student, athlete and citizen I'm quite aware that I will continue to learn new things that 
will allow me to create a new style of approach to physical and mental training, and maybe improve 
these same , with additional complementary methods ;
I am convinced that if I did it myself, being before very unaware of how your performance can be 
improved if you have enough desire to increase your skills , for example through your study , 
experience and confidence in your own potential , I can guarantee that you can and must do it 
whether this short book can serve as a stimulus or not.
However, it is false if I admit that what I wrote is not the result of a direct experience of the 
amazing things that can be done by influencing the body with the mind and the character with the 
body - mind .
2009 was the year when I came into contact with the mental training , reading the testimony of a 
man who claimed to be able to recover very quickly using techniques of self-encouragement (which 
I later learned was called autosuggestion ) and how they were able to help him block the harmful 
thoughts that with the proven symptom of psychosomatic disorders can impair athletic performance 
and mental life .
In 2009, after years of sporting success , suddenly , gradually , coming in contact with certain 
people who were simply amplifying my faults , I began to feel more and more exhaust and I almost 
disavowed the things I believed in.
I did not realise that suggestion and auto-suggestion of group ritual ( spinel , insults, acceptance of 
many wrong things like the social indifference ) , were encouraging to my detriment some shady 
characters that made these things daily bread and assertiveness , while I and others were paying the 
price of it.
However, if you are not completely defenceless , and it is not my case , at some point you realise 
that you can not be a friend of a person who wants to rob us of our power , our dignity and will.
As a result of this I realised that the long period spent with these people I was being gradually 
deprived of a potential willingness and energy that I have always had.
So I understood that the first step was to get used to the physical pain that through sport makes us 
stronger .
Gradually I began to have new energy, confidence and willingness , but it was not what I had 
always felt : great physical strength, desire to do hard exercises , desire for new challenges.
It was only then that I realised that the losses of energy were more disturbing as they were also 
linked to the mind.
I do not mean that suddenly everything has improved and through mental training I solved it .
No, far from it;
I had to get away from those people with whom I quarrelled at the end , I had to go back and study 
some things that I had left out , as the importance of sleep , the inner dialogue and what and by 
whom and by what means we can gradually develop what many call exhaustion .
Only after this process where I had to go back to study psychology and practise high-level sport and 
above all I came back with tenacious will to believe as I had done in the past in what  I was doing , I 
eventually recovered almost all mental and physical energies .
Now, just with the writing - witness of this book , I finally developed my style of mental training , 
strengthening with visualisation , imagination, suggestion and auto-suggestion , even my physical  
sports abilities .
Now , after 5 years.
I hope I can convince even one person , ironically , to believe that I had this experience , but I wish 
they would open a door that will lead many to realize how much strength there is in our thoughts 
and in those of others.
Introduction
"Real Illusion" was born from the need to explain myself the reality of mental application to 
physical training , starting with what seems like a ritual or a holder that is apparently not something 
tangible like training the body with the mind .
But as the title of the book  says , the world of so-called " illusions " , especially if these thoughts 
are illusions caused by our " thinking " inside " ourselves " , are much more real and stronger than 
you might believe .
The " corpus " of this book is supported by a series of solid evidence of psychiatrists, hypnotists , 
sports and self-learners who have used and helped others or themselves to strengthen the capacity of 
concentration , visualisation, imagination and willpower obviously necessary to apply in an ever 
more effective way the mental training .
I tried not to limit myself to an unvarnished list , but I have filled some apparent gaps with a long 
series of more or less personal considerations which I hope will serve to illuminate from within 
those who read these pages also to remind myself to those who read and those who decide to apply 
these methods, what the true origins of sports are , that is those moral and mental , of our people 
who together with the ancient Greeks has always given important and fundamental contribution to  
the true and powerful Western culture .
The bases of nutrition and training are necessary to understand the mental training and apply it to 
sports techniques .
The reader can thus consciously look at the reasons and causes of this book , which I hope will 
serve to convince him to find his own method .
CHAPTER 1
Sport Performance and Mental Training
The sports performance in the above case is the act in which an athlete tries to get the victory AND 
competitiveness giving , it is assumed , the maximum degree of commitment in the performance of 
athletic movement required by his discipline .
During the years following the Second World War , that is, with the birth of modern sport , the 
approach to physical preparation of athletes has undergone significant steps forward.
Studies about specific nutrition suitable for any type of sport; decade after decade, began to be 
studied we have focused on the typical methods of training of champions of each discipline and was  
found ( much less than you might think though) a method of ' training congenial to most able-
bodied people .
Studies were conducted ( in truth arriving very late compared to what many fans already knew 
instinctively ) that have debunked some of the false myths about the age when you had a maximum  
physical and mental term , and another in which " as if by magic "These came down suddenly .
But there is one factor , that of mental training , which has long been considered little and instead , 
could be the " icing on the cake," that something extra that athletes far above average , have or 
even , in the case of two champions of the same level , the resource that allows unexpected 
overtaking.
The term " mental training " may seem earth-shattering, but it really is not very different from that 
applied in the physical training exercise.
Studies on this the widespread practice today , almost mechanical , especially in sports where the 
maximum energy is needed in the immediacy, began  from what many champions and experts have 
defined with the nebulous term "concentration" .
This is the key point to understand what the metal training is which undoubtedly has its origins in 
what obviously the champions have and that others do not that is the positive visualisation is often 
used at the beginning automatically and unconsciously. They convince themselves of a winning 
result and they get it and such act may be more important than any medicine , diet plan or workout 
routine .
How many times do we see someone use the same routine without achieving remarkable results , 
even the most talented athletes ? On the contrary , there have been athletes who have trained in an 
unconventional way achieving exceptional results. The answer is the mental training that comes 
from mental suggestion or self-hypnosis , both of them have been applied to sport ( in particular 
boxing and weightlifting ), starting initially from the observation of an athlete who runs a gym , 
who obtained exceptional result also in the increased performance of athletes ( boxers in this case ) 
who entered immediately into the match , relying on the mechanisms of self-concentration . Such 
methods obviously have a greater effect on those who have already innate abilities of suggestion 
and auto-suggestion. Baptist , this is the name of the coach, was devoted to it and had already 
spread , initially in an " underground way " the mental training using a method that can be described 
in two essential steps :
1) touch and send mental messages to the body part involved in the athletic gesture ; in other words 
he created a situation in which he gave real mental messages to his body through the subconscious 
in order to produce the phenomenon .
2) It creates in the mind a clear picture of the area involved in the athletic gesture ,  convincing it to 
unleash its maximum capacity.
( For instance imagining that the arm is a piece of steel that can knock down a wall or lift a truck ) 
(or convincing themselves that a huge load is a paltry load creating the image of the load to be
lifted , for example, a high weight say 200 kg and imagining either that is a load of 20 kg or that we 
are able to treat it as light as a chair for the force that we exercise ) .
Baptist inhaled deeply and exhaled , the first gesture with his nostrils , and the second on a regular 
basis with lips parted.
Through months and years of use of " mental training " you can really , as on the physical aspect , 
to produce the desired condition imagining and becoming aware of what you imagine happening.
The mental training , as evidenced by , evokes the presence of the subconscious which  if you  
continuously repeat a thought , will eventually be accepted as truth by the subconscious and will 
produce the condition that you created in the mind because he believes in what you want to make 
him feel accepting and storing it .
In the past, due to cultural prejudices and myths that have led to the emergence and spread of 
stereotypes that are utter nonsense , the mind was separated from the body.
Worse were able to do some alleged " teachers " with snobbery that claimed that the excessive 
development of the skills of the body negatively influenced the mental abilities . In truth the most 
narcissistic inability to admit that the great physical abilities are linked to the body and its genetic 
structure that only nature can give and also to special mental qualities .
But the unfounded prejudices are made to be systematically overthrown , over time , in truth few 
decades have denied such judgments and looking at the physical and psychological characteristics , 
all , more or less , could see , as the " body machine " while having a bodywork and a powerful 
engine had to have the computerised control unit called the brain that had just as special features .
Starting from these considerations, we can say that to prepare and amplify the mental capacity has 
an almost comparable importance to prepare and amplify the physical ones .
To do this, starting from the post war period mental training of emergent , enthusiast and  
professional athletes was born.
It consists in identifying mental characteristics observed in emerging athletes who make great 
strides according to each discipline and enthusiasts who understand the level of concentration 
necessary to train well .
Then of course the professional athletes who have innate abilities , but have to amplify them at most 
to have full control and get superior performances .
Let’s proceed by levels:
The emerging athlete may be in the growth phase and be in a very mature age .
Regardless of age it is necessary to do between 12 and 15 years of continuous training to move 
from a state of development of the potential to one that is close to the maximum level of 
development.
The mental characteristics that you need to check out right at the beginning and observe in  children 
athletes are the same as those to control and observe in mature age.
However, the degree of mental awareness which converges with different physical characteristics  
needs two different methods of mental training .
In the case of subjects in childhood mental training precedes these features :
Prepare the boy to be conscious of the fact that his body is and will be for many years in evolution.
To the previous point the boy must think that the mental feeling is necessary toget the most later.
What influences us from the outside must continue to remain so , because the concentration in 
performance makes us face the hardships that come from the family and school.
The boy should not be in a hurry but take a longer route , in line with the development of his brain 
and of his character.
The boy must consider the sport an integral part of a mosaic that is "Life " and its difficulties, 
friends, girlfriends , etc. .
In the case of people very mature of age mental training provides these features:
1) An awareness already high because of advanced age, facilitates the fact that you have to train 
your mind to be subject to such fact that the changes will not rejuvenate at all, but a youthful 
mindset will give strong motivation without overdoing it.
2) Have in most cases already achieved a lot in life , allows you to plan mentally in a better way the 
objectives and strategies .
3) To recover the mental potential of a young athlete is easier than it sounds : the 50 years of today 
are 35 years of last century. Rediscovering the charge will allow you to live the aspects of life that 
mattered most and that often the high conformism adulthood tends erroneously to confine in the 
past.
4) Point 3 coincides with the mind-set of a person in age of development .
5) It may be a new target , a new source of energy with life, a mental workout that makes you deal 
with the third and fourth age aware that you can always give your best.
The first phase of what appears to be a complicated process is to bring the person to strengthen the 
link with his own feelings and convince them to follow them after being aware of such feelings .
The athlete must learn to speak to " himself " by placing questions like : "How do I feel? " "Am I 
competitive enough today? " " Would it be better to increase training and tend to superior results ? " 
" Shall I Go further ? " .
The next step is to answer these questions for themselves , and who can, better than the athlete , 
since it is only him that may give the right answer ? The others can only help him. By learning how 
to talk to yourself to pick up the signals your body sends us learn to modulate , control, trigger or 
amplify his own individual skills .
The best example to create a clearer idea is this: I have to train , but I ask all these questions , based 
on the conditions that I feel , I have to turn those feelings into something real according to this 
scheme obviously taken as an example:
How do I feel ? All right. Am I competitive enough ? Yes I can amplify my workout ? Yes, today is 
the right time.
So we create in the mind that makes it automatically , a scheme that will serve as a single , a 
scheme like : Am I fine ? Give the best. Simple . Or Am I wrong trying to understand the signals of 
the body? I train less intensely , I need more rest , I have to eat a little more, I came back too late 
yesterday , I'm doing too many excesses .
In practice, just like after years of calculations we know that 2 +2 is 4 without thinking about it , or 
read and study trying to understand and everything is done automatically , the same process of 
mental training described so far follows the same path for an athlete .
Now as we mentioned before it is essential to understand the importance of breathing while you do 
the workout or while we have to perform the maximum performance it is important in order to 
create and to trigger the mechanism for the concentration , in connection with the body, visualising 
ourselves while performing a superhuman athletic gesture .
Why ? Because every time we breathe we reload additional energy , it is as our brain resets and 
reorganise itself in that second when we inhale and exhale .
Also the body receives with the oxygen the same source of energy.
We have seen how some pioneers were created mental images to be transmitted to the 
subconscious , that settles what strikes us either we realise it or not, positively or not, within our 
memory
Breathing should , when you want to consciously create an accurate picture that will be our goal , 
act as a switch .
In practice, a natural and automatic gesture , in certain contexts has to be to made conscious in 
order to increase , concentration and visualisation, which are the basis of mental training and 
achieve sports performance to the maximum .
To do this you need to think about how we breathe : as we said it is natural and automatic , takes 
place with elastic movement of the lungs, with the concentration of the walls and bottom of the 
chest cavity where these are included.
It is located between the neck and the abdomen along with the heart and lungs.
The thoracic cavity is circumscribed by the spine behind the ribs, and the muscles that surround it 
outside , and below there is the diaphragm.
At a time when we breathe we notice that our muscles dilate the lungs and so we have the feeling of 
"emptiness" in which we perceive the descending air .
So concentrating on " realising " this mechanism , we can associate it with the right mental image , 
for example by pressing a switch "on and off " , or " up and down " .
This thought might lead us to control when you are training or during sports competition , the 
athletic feats and create that mental suggestion previously explained in its essence .
By the time in practice , we learn not only to breathe better , but we also get a major expansion of 
the lungs and the maximum absorption of the primary source of breathing that is the oxygen.
The example to trigger the mechanism of visualisation, concentration and evocation of the image 
(for example, the arm can lift a truck before lifting a barbell in the real world ) is "suggestion 
according to Baptist " , we must inhale thinking to each of these and the key on and then on or 
before athletic or as a simple exercise to communicate to familiarise yourself with this practice and 
believe it, send out the air.
So you'll see that the method in which you breathe is the complete one and you can increase control 
in order to learn the mental training , you can possibly use this exercise :
standing or sitting with your upper body straight , inhale through the nose , fill your lungs with air , 
using the part of the diaphragm that you can sense for the fact that the abdomen goes ' out for the 
consequence of its work, then continue to inhale without stopping thinking of the chest, ribs, 
sternum and chest that goes on rising , then move to the top.
All must be continuous , the thought and the image that you evoke go hand in hand with the 
breathing and the key "on " .
You can also hold air for a few moments at the end of the movement when you enter the air.
The Mental Training , to be applied to the perfection must be considered an integral part of the 
workout itself and requires specific training .
Once again all those who practice it , invite not to be impressed by the alleged difficulty as it was 
almost a mysterious art , to be scared by the misnomer " Mental Training " .
As I said, it is the habit of exercising control , with thoughts and images of us training or 
performing the competition , to amplify and interpret the potential of the body " developing a strong 
Sixth Sense," a special insight that we can only have within our selves with the voluntary stimulus 
of images , situations and mental thoughts .
Let me describe in simple terms the "techniques" to apply this to the pictures through images , 
through situations to situations , and to the mental thoughts through mental thoughts .
PICTURES: what do we do when it is very cold and we say to someone " " It is bitterly cold ! " ?
We could just say this , but we often evoke scenes of hot summer days on the beach, warmed by the 
sun ;
The same mental evocation of an image we have to apply under the " Mental Training ", the 
example is this : what do we do when we make an inhuman effort ? If the pain occurs we are 
tempted to stop .
We could simply make us feel dominated by the above, but if we instead before the effort evoke the 
image of us who perform the effort imagining the execution of the exercise and of us who always 
perform in our mind, laughing and talking , bowing legs or arms trying with the same feeling of 
pain , " virtually nothing ", which is when we grab a pen and then associating always with 
imagination and fantasy brutal effort to banal gesture ?
Someone has shown that over time there will be an analogy between the two thoughts and two 
actions , even if they are totally different . In practice, the ease of lifting a pen , the mind associates 
it to a brutal effort .
SITUATIONS : What happens in the difficult moments of life '. Let's think of situations where we 
have solved all the problems .
For example, we need to find out what's wrong with a decoding process , we find it whatever the 
field , and we feel good.
Another example : we have to pass a difficult exam , we prepare and overcome .
Now , how do we feel ?
We feel self-confident and feel like an inner drive that would allow us and almost give us the desire 
to break down every other obstacle .
As for sports we have to use essentially the same procedure: we have to face a harder workout , or 
test ourselves in a competition.
What " mental situation " shall we have in order to mentally prepare ourselves to give our best 
physically ?
We have to think about all those times in training in which we have made unexpected great strides , 
and we must think about the anger and the determination we used .
We must think of the races in which we dominated , when we are faced with new challenges, think 
very hard, almost to see with open eyes , situations and emotions linked to success in real previous 
competitions and voluntarily and set them in a workout or in a new competition .
Enhancing the Connection between Body and Mind
At this point it becomes clear that the body and mind work together to get each other "favours " .
The more the body is responsive , efficient , agile , the more the brain is .
If you proceed in reverse you will find in most cases , that a reactive , efficient and agile mind 
belongs either to a person who has such characteristics also in the body , or to one that has already 
ventured successfully in more than one sport .
To strengthen this connection is very useful not only for conventional methods , but also others that 
at first may seem unconventional , however over time they will be accepted without problems .
First of all : the 100 billion neurones in our brain mass is not limited to age, every day we can 
"train" with the methods of mental training , let’s say two hundred fifty - three hundred thousand 
new neurones .
When you increase the number of new challenges , both physical and mental you increase the 
difficulty of the training , the type of exercise , the pattern of training , the style .
Play every now and then, if you want to video game Tetris or similar that can increase 
coordination , memory and mental agility.
The stimulator that works without a high risk of toxicity is coffee.
Drink it ( 2-3 cups of coffee per day , preferably in the morning) .
It has been shown , ( but it is something that Italians and before them the Eastern peoples have 
known for millennia ), that it stimulates the nervous system increasing pressure , pulse and 
respiration rate and alertness .
It increases the activation of brain regions involved in the mechanisms of attention , it improves 
short-term memory and reaction times .
Learning to play or sing , increases intelligence , the capacity of the motor cortex and cerebellum, 
and coordination with the increase of the corpus callosum ( massive structure that connects the right 
and left hemispheres of the brain ) may increase the connections since many brain cells in the 
corpus callosum are lost after birth.
Every now and then if you have five or ten minutes to meditate , sit back, take a break on the couch 
or a chair if possible , in silence and let your mind wander.
By the time (actually already after 3 months), you'll be more alert, concentrated , more able to 
perform cognitive tasks than before .
Also the ability to listen and experience the sensations , will increase with the increase of glial cells 
(which carry and let neurones absorb nutrients ) and there is also a swelling of the blood vessels of 
the brain.
This is important , because the connection body - mind , or the ability to listen and to evoke the 
sensations of the body and body functions carried out during training and the race , are an essential 
part of mental training and of the acquisition of skills, that everybody , to a greater or lesser extent, 
following the instructions described in the preceding pages , can do.
We have already said that the saying " too many muscles hinder the brain " has been dismantled by 
thousands of people , but I have to repeat it because now no one can deny that playing sport gives 
rise to new neurones in the hippocampus (the area of the brain that controls memory and spatial 
orientation ) .
The hippocampus doubles the size and therefore the brain learns and stores better .
It has better executive functions , better planning capabilities , a more combative attitude and 
mental faculties that can be improved regardless of when you start a physical activity, associated to 
the mental training .
What has now been amply demonstrated , is that physical activity and mental training required by 
the various levels of performance, significantly increases memory and the ability to perform tasks .
It is not uncommon to see people of seventy that even if they have only just begun , after a year " of 
training " have brain connections of people of thirty .
This is because sports and mental training potentiate the same molecules and the same cells 
involved in many mental tasks , in addition to the fact that sports and mental workout mutually 
reinforce .
What has been said so far can be further supported by the diet, which means eating a bit 'of 
everything and the right thing at the right time.
For example, to facilitate the physical and mental activity you have to follow a flexible scheme , in 
the sense that learning to listen to the sensations of the body , we can understand when we need 
more of one thing or less of another .
Training Schedule
The training scheme starts from the basic concept that it will be repeated over time, but shaped 
according to the needs , difficulties and the ability of the individual who performs it in person but