Can NLP be used to become stronger? To add to your fitness? Can it be used to gain better physical movement skills? Absolutely. It’s just one of the areas that can greatly expand what most people think of when they think about mental training for sports and training in the gym.
Over the past week and into the next two weeks I’m attending a NLP Practitioner certification course. Most people aren’t familiar with NLP so I will go into a little bit of detail on it. NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistics Programming. It was created actually in my hometown of Santa Cruz at the university where I’m currently studying it by John Grinder and Richard Bandler, with the help of many, many other people who have expanded upon what it originally was.
NLP is a cognitive science and a model for greater levels of communication. Greater communication between people but it’s also hugely effective even with done just by yourself. It is based on the ideas that everyone creates their own reality within their mind and body, and other people can actually find and change that map of reality depending on the end goal desired. You can model the success of other people not just externally (for instance by following the same workout plant) but internally as well (how they THINK about training).
A quote from one of the lead instructors Judy Delozier, “If there’s something I can’t do out here, there’s probably something I can’t do in here.” Out there referring to external reality and in here referring in your internal body and mind.
When we apply that to training it’s just as true. We all understand how to become stronger or achieve basically any fitness goal. Progressive training really isn’t very complex. Often times it’s just made more complex by trainers. So besides the fact that it takes time, why haven’t you achieved everything you ever set out to do? It has to do with what’s inside.
Now there’s a lot going on inside that can mess up this process. Criteria, values, identity, behavior, negative anchors, beliefs, incongruent parts, meta programs, propulsion systems, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure I’ll be covering more of this in the coming days.