I want to share a story with you because it is a good example of why I am so invested in NeuralTraining and why I co-founded NeuroPickleball. I know many of you have experienced similar circumstances and may benefit from reading this.
The other day I woke up and immediately began “filling my bucket” with stressors. My wife was having a massive migraine, our daughter in San Diego was being tested for COVID-19, I missed my morning workout and had two other stressful encounters that morning. I then found I was late for my scheduled pickleball training/playing. I arrived at the court in a rush and did not have time to do my regular neural warmup created by my friends at NeuroAthlete. During our pickleball warmup, my mind was a million miles away. I then lost the first 6 games with alternating partners and felt I could do nothing right. What made it particularly surprising and disappointing was that I had played really well with the same players earlier that week.
That’s when I decided to practice what we teach.
So what was going on in the video? I took part of a break to do one of my go-to neural reset drills. I came back and won the next two games and one of the players commented afterwards that I clearly started playing better, not knowing that I had done anything differently.
It wasn’t quite Clark Kent coming out of the phone booth as Superman, but it was a remarkable change in a very short period of time with very little effort. Stress is fungible, so even though my neural drill was completely different in nature than the things that caused stress in the first place, it worked really well. Learning how to reduce your own threat is one of the many (and easiest) ways NeuralTraining can improve your on-court performance
