Hypnosis in Personal Training

I tend to blur the lines between my Hypnotherapy and my Personal Training. Doing one helps me to be better at the other, there is a skillset that crosses over nicely, and most importantly helps my clients get the results that they want.

During Personal Training I have to constantly monitor my client’s body language, emotions, mental outlook – yes I even monitor their thoughts – and guide them to where they need to be. I have to be sharp when on the pads, noticing every movement in my opponent to know exactly how and where my client will strike – holding the pads safety for both of us is my responsibility. I have to use a heightened state of sensory acuity. I utilise a whole number of linguistic skills from hypnotic language patterns, cognitive linguistics, and the realms of metaphor, clean language – every pattern I need to guide the thoughts in my client’s head, be better understood, and perhaps most importantly understand my client better. This doesn’t just help my clients, but also sharpens my skills for hypnotherapy.

A couple of weeks back I brought full on hypnotic phenomena into a standard Personal Training session. I have a talented 6 year old as a client, who enjoys his judo and mixed martial arts training with me. Training a 6 year old one-on-one for an hour keeps you on your toes! You have to make the session interesting, constantly changing what you are doing, keeping attention, monitoring his physical and mental condition. And you can’t train him the same as an adult. It is a challenge, and one that I thoroughly enjoy.

And in this session I was being challenged by his weak grip during judo throws. When he pulled hard he would lose his grip, therefore losing control, and not succeed in throwing. I needed to do something about this. So I got his hand, put it on the wall, and without a formal hypnosis induction stuck it to the wall so he couldn’t pull it away. Kids respond so well to hypnosis that it was achieved in about 20 seconds. I got him to transfer that ‘stuck’ to a grip on my sleeve – and suddenly his relatively weak grip was really strong – he could pull and pull me but because his hand was ‘stuck’ to my jacket sleeve the grip wasn’t broken. We’d captured his imagination and his body responded in kind.

After some throwing practice I got him to stand up. Using a principle currently being seen used by the street magician Dynamo (very talented, nice style, entertaining and fresh, check him out!) I first lifted him up easily off the ground. I then taught him to follow a mental process to stick his feet to the floor, to make him so heavy that he just couldn’t be moved. It was funny watching his mum try to lift him up when he was doing this – he had become so heavy!

I applied this principle to his holds, where he would do this mental process to stick himself to the floor – and with brilliant results pinning me so much more easily. For me underneath him, being held, he felt twice as heavy when he was using the mental technique.

Of course as with any training, it takes deliberate practice and repetition for the procedural memories, the muscle memories, to just allow this all to happen without conscious thought. Yet this was a lovely start, and a fun blend of hypnosis to get better results from my personal training. It made the session fun for both of us and the results came quicker. It opened my eyes, yet again, to what was potentially possible.

And this has got me wondering what other approaches I can use from hypnosis to speed up my client’s results…