Keep Your Guard Up!

I had some good fun at the weekend, playing with various methods of getting results with my Personal Training sessions. Now, as any good hypnotherapist would, I use embedded commands, metaphors, voice tonality and hypnotic language patterns with my clients while training them. It makes sense to use your skills in one area to help you in another. Rather than meet problems head on, you can gently lead your clients to where they need to be covertly, often during other tasks or just generally chatting during the recovery periods. It gets the results far faster. And I have to be honest – I have great fun doing this!

So while I have enjoyed utilising my linguistic skills, and even inducing covert trance states in my clients, I hadn’t actually utilised physical hypnotic phenomena yet to get results with my fighters – until last Saturday that is.

One of my clients, who (as all my clients do) works very hard and diligently, had an issue with his guard. He just couldn't maintain a good solid guard, his hands dropping far too low. I was having a really good ‘play’ psychologically that day and suddenly I had a 'light bulb' moment. I quickly utilised an adaptation of a simple hypnosis suggestibility test during a demonstration of what I needed him to do for his guard. And this had incredible results on my client, who suddenly was keeping a very, very tight guard perfectly and effortlessly.

I tested this over a few rounds, and the change was almost miraculous. So, as every geek like me would, I decided to test this result. Thoroughly.

I proceeded to totally ‘beast’ my client with pads, he hit more pads in twenty minutes than he’d probably hit in his entire life. I took him through such an intense workout that when he finished the beasting, he couldn’t even lift his water to his lips.

And then I gave him a very technical five minute round of boxing pads, firing the trigger for keeping his guard at the start. His guard was perfect. His techniques came even better as a byb-product. The expression on his face was amazement combined with a little confusion, and of course a lot of sweat! I must have looked like an 8 year old at Christmas.

Later that day I got a text from him, saying “I’m still scratching my head. How you made me keep my guard up even when I was well and truly f***ed is beyond me!”

Of course, I replied, in the immortal words of Lee Francis (Avid Merrion) playing David Blaine – “It’s all...because...of the magic!”

But, the best bit is, I didn’t make him keep his guard up – he did it himself. A little combination of physiology combined with the power of suggestion, something that even the most inexperienced hypnotist could handle, and he quite happily kept his guard up there himself. I hadn’t actually done anything!

Perhaps it is really good to allow experience from one area to cross over to another. It has left a client and me really happy – and I’m still grinning with how stupidly simple the whole thing was to achieve!