What is the best thing to do before a competition when you start to feel the butterflies?

Before competition take some time to sit still with yourself, and do this breathwork. It will help to calm your nerves:

• Sit in a comfortable seated position, most likely butterfly pose!
• Take 30 inhale/exhale breaths, making the breath long and steady.
• Focus only on the breathing, wathching the breath as it moves in and out of the body.
• After 30 breaths, sit a few more minutes, as you now focus of those butterflies that were once in your body, now out in the field flying playfully around!

Good Luck! Dream Big! Hope this helps!

A Lesson to Live By…

Life is full of opportunity for us to do either the right thing or the wrong. We have the opportunity to make choices every moment that we are alive!

• Did we return the video on time?
• Did we leave the hotel room a mess for someone else to pick up?
• Were we completely truthful when approached with a question from a friend?
• Did we give the little extra when we had it?

The more good choices we make each day, each minute, each breath, the more we plant good seeds into life’s soil. With an honest loving heart as our root, all that we attemp, all that we are faced with, will open and flow more easily! So any action we ever take or word we express make an imprint, plants a seed.

This life lesson even works in our own thoughts! What we even think about can leave impressions in our lives. That is why meditation and mental imagery is so important in an athlete’s life.

• Try never thinking “I can’t” or “this is to hard”: your brain waves send these messages to your body, and that seed will make it hard to gain the confidence to learn a new skill.
• Mental imagery performing your routine or skill will determine how you perform later on.
• Meditation can help to plant seeds of “nerves of steel” during an intense competition.

So remember PLANTING GOOD SEEDS = SPROUTING HEALTHY LIVES! Start creating your beautiful garden today!!

Yoga is a very powerful tool any athlete can incorporate into their practice. Whether you choose to add 10 minutes or 1 hour of yoga a day to your practice, you will get the benefits! Yoga helps to increase a persons mental focus and concentration. For a gymnast, this can be most helpful during the heavy heated competition pressure, or while in practice preparing routines, or learning new skills.

The stretches in asanas (yoga postures/poses), combined with the rhythmic breathing in yoga practice, make for a much more lubricating effect on the joints and muscles in an athletes body. Rather than the static, sometimes rough stretching in usual gymnastics warm-up or cool-down, a gymnasts joints and body will move more smoothly with a yogic accompiniment. Not only flexibility of the muscles and joints will be increased, but flexibility of the mind will take place.

Body and mind integration is the key to yoga, and when incorporated into a gymnasts practice will also help to keep the importance of present moment awareness. So during competition they will feel fully focused and confident!