Over the years an immense amount of resources and funds have been invested in studies and tools to improve the achievements of professional athletes. The majority of these research studies focused on gaining a deeper understanding of the physiological and biological aspects. Although a great deal of information that promotes results has been accumulated, it seems that in recent years the resources have been exhausted and progress has stalled, with subsequent fewer new results. This has led the scientific community to embrace new and effective approaches that can catapult athletic achievements to a higher level.
My name is Eyal Friedman and I am a Chinese and holistic medicine practitioner. I specialize in sports medicine and have 27 years of experience under my belt. I have been practicing martial arts for most of my life. As someone who has been involved in competitive sports as both an athlete and medical practitioner, I was able to explore the issue in practice, and implement methods that have been researched to varying degrees. My day to day work has led me to proven insights that have been repeatedly effective with clients and athletes for many years.
The main difference between a regular person that does sport for leisure and a professional athlete is his nature. A professional athlete doesn’t like to lose. He assumes a competitive approach to everything he does. A professional athlete is prepared to do everything to always be at his best, especially before a competition. This competitive nature generates a high degree of physical stress among the athletes, which is sometimes too much.
As someone who has helped numerous athletes and sports teams through achievement-related struggles, I discovered that the emotional aspects play a significant role in injuries. We’ve often wondered why a certain team reached impressive achievements in a specific year while the same team could not come close to reproducing those achievements another year. Often we’ll see a player that was hardly injured for an entire year while in other seasons he was injured all the time. Does luck play a role in such cases? The answer is not really.
The Emotional X-Factor
Now’s
the time to introduce the Emotional X-Factor and to harness its immense,
available, and inexpensive energy. Although knowledge about the emotional
element currently exists, it’s vastly underutilized and not properly and
practically channeled to be translated into better performance and
achievements.
My experience and in-depth knowledge of the industry has shown me that most of
our resources that improve performance are fundamentally in a subconscious and
conflictive place that is difficult and problematic to access.
Most of our behavior and decisions stem from the subconscious, which archives
knowledge and memories from times that we are neither aware of nor remember.
The problem is that not only are we incorrectly communicating with that subconscious dimension, but also that the soul operates according to a completely different language and codes than our logic and reason, and is often completely opposed to our desire. This can lead to a drop in energy and a tendency to get injured. No child wakes up in the morning and says to himself that he wants to be fat-sick-divorced when he grows up, so we understand that desire is not what determines what really happens. With regards to the soul, the disease or injury is not a problem but the soul’s way of sending a message of defense and expression.
The soul speaks in a completely different language and codes than logic, so it will be ready to do anything, including harm ourselves and our existence to convey the message that it wants to convey. The same internal conflict that was created between logic and reason, and the soul and emotion, can reach unimaginable heights.
The soul does not have a mouth and words to express what it wants. The soul’s mouth is the body, so it will express itself through emotional and behavioral drama. Although this is a different language, it is still focused, which can explain, for example, chronic injuries in specific places. These places become an emotional center of gravity in the body and whenever there is stress and physical impact, there is a greater chance that the athlete will get repeatedly injured in that same area.
When we create emotional balance, we not only lower conflictive elements significantly, but we also receive an immense source of energy that supports, strengthens, and heals us better and faster. Emotional balance comes from inner observation, identifying the conflictive elements within us, and understanding how to make peace with and defeat them. This is usually a brief, simple, inexpensive and logical process, but most importantly it brings results, and in an achievement-driven world, this is the bottom line.