Mental skills personal experiment (1): Eastern martial arts traditions and their application to strength sports
Strength sports are still a lot about pushing the athlete through the stress curve. I am a competitive powerlifter and a researcher and I have been looking at this subject from inside and out. From the inside, there are two distinct approaches to achieving the “special maximum strength” observed in certain meets: the extreme stress-driven performance, with a lot of screaming, hitting and other means of enhancing alertness and stress response, and the focused approach. The latter is less common.
With the help of a more experienced and accomplished lifter, I came to adopt the focused approach about a year and a half ago. We called it the “white chair thing”. Basically, I spent the moments preceding my turn to lift facing the back of an available white plastic chair, emptying my mind. It is hard to claim this is the one or chief reason why my performance leaped to another level, I broke a couple of national and continental records and visibly improved. There were other factors involved.
After this event, however, I started systematically searching for evidence in the literature. Besides a very old article from decades ago showing competent Olympic lifters performed mental rehearsal of their lifts in opposition to less competent ones, there was very little published material. The search brought me to martial arts techniques. That, however, is a whole different realm of encoded knowledge. I wanted to understand the concept and application of QIGONG training to strength tasks.
The only way to do it, it seemed to me, was to learn through practice. I spent one year (from November 2007 to October 2008) learning qigong in a tai-chi-chuan program. During this one year, I was frustrated. My performance was irregular, mediocre at competitions and my injuries were a real impediment.
About three weeks after I quit tai-chi-chuan, however, I started applying some qigong techniques in weight training. The results impressed me. I want to create a self-experiment on this and record my results. I haven’t been doing this the way I want.
I hope to get some feedback, encouragement and even a little scolding if needed to carry on this initiative. If I am right, this might be of great help to many athletes who still believe they need a lot of stress enhancing devices to achieve good marks.
Marilia
Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.

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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Many thanks for opening up this discussion.
I don't know much about Eastern philosophies or qigong specifically, but what you described with the white chair does sound pretty familiar. Certainly when I did some training in Gestalt and Humanistic counselling, we used to meditate to bring ourselves in to the present and become more aware of our thoughts and emotions, one of the benefits being that we could put distracting or unhelpful thoughts to one side.
From a more mainstream psychological perspective, it also makes me think of the playful state in Reversal Theory, which is about being in the present, and not concerned with what has gone before or might happen in the future.
Hopefully we'll get some more responses to this. It could prove to be really interesting.
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Rob Robson
Co-founder, iStadia.com
Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
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Rob Robson
Co-founder, iStadia.com
Gary Baker
The Centre for Sports Hypnosis
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