On your Bike?

Making the most of Samsung Bike Week with Hypnotherapy  Samsung Bike Week is 16-24 June 2012  Hypnotherapy can help with motivation and performance.  The aim of the week is to demonstrate the social, health and environmental benefits of cycling, and to get people to give cycling a go all over the UK, whether this be for fun, as a means of getting around to the local shops or just to visit friends.  Bike week reminds us all of the importance of exercise and to get on our bikes this summer, but if you like many of us want to improve your performance or start anew in a chosen sport, be it cycling or otherwise, then Hypnotherapy may be the answer! We often see clients who appreciate how beneficial physical exercise can be, and would like to get started, but lack the confidence or motivation to do so.  Using Solution Focused Hypnotherapy techniques I help them to visualise what aspects of their lives would be better once they are exercising regularly.  These positive mental images help them to make the necessary changes in their lifestyle.  Initiatives such as Bike Week provide a valuable focus by showing how cycling can easily be a part of everyday life”. Hypnotherapy uses mental imagery “the process of imagining the performance of a skill with no related overt actions” (1) for many different areas including sports performance, and the efficacy of the technique is well documented.   Mental imagery in sports is often used for performance enhancement and consists of mentally rehearsing key aspects of your chosen sport as if you were actually doing it and, of course, imagining it going well!  An overview of research of mental imagery in athletics carried out in 1997 indicated that mental imagery has been used successfully with a wide variety of sports and has been found to be effective not just for improving performance but is useful for skill acquisition, anxiety management, self-confidence enhancement, and pain control. “So, if you want to get on your bike, whether it be for the first time in decades or for competitive sports performance, hypnotherapy can help” Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is a modern research-based combination of psychotherapy and hypnosis, aimed at encouraging clients to focus on how they want things to be.  Practitioners avoid problem-talk and instead help clients to relax and to visualise their preferred future.