HypnoSport

Find out more on the HypnoSport website here.

HypnoSport is a coaching service specialising in sports performance enhancement for high school students through hypnosis.

With 50 years experience as a GP and a deep understanding of human behaviour, Dr Martyn Baker aims to empower young athletes by unlocking their mental resilience, focus and confidence. The service will cater to students in individual or small group sessions, emphasising customised, goal-oriented coaching to improve their sports performance.

Evidence-based hypnosis techniques can promote mental strength and self-belief helping athletes to achieve peak performance.

Sport engages most of us. As spectators it often involves a roller coaster ride of emotions. It can result in joy, ecstasy, disappointment and even despair.

As a competitor the emotions are often necessarily contained but no less real. Managing those emotions is often the key to success or failure for the individual in the intensely competitive sporting environment.

Sporting or athletic talent is a wonderful gift. Its development involves years of nurturing that talent assisted by vital coaching and endless training. The psychological pressures of competing are inevitable and performance anxiety is at the core of the journey to sporting excellence. There is a fine line between success and failure and the key to success lies within the brain’s capacity to deal with the stress of the moment.

Sports psychology plays a significant role in modern sport at both the individual and team level. ‘Getting an edge’ is based in psychology. The talent of the individual sportsperson is a given. Hypnotherapy can also be a major force in managing sporting stress but is much less often practiced. It can be seen as a very time efficient form of meditation or mindfulness which can be tailored to the individual and used to focus the mind in the critical moments prior to competing.

Self hypnosis is a skill which can easily be learned and applied at a young age. Teenagers and young adults generally make excellent hypnotic subjects. The teenage brain for all its complexities is primed for learning and acquiring psychological skills at an early age can be vital.

Dr Martyn Baker has been a Sydney GP for 49 years. For over 40 years of that time he has taught patients self hypnosis. Initially this was used to help women manage pain during childbirth in his GP obstetric practice and since then to help patients self manage all forms of anxiety.

During that time he has also enabled many teenagers to significantly reduce their performance anxiety in sport. A lifetime of passionate involvement in sport both as a participant and spectator has inspired him to want to make a difference in helping young people manage sporting anxiety by teaching them how to benefit from self hypnosis.