Why Sports Are Good For The Mind

The quick response of muscles to stimuli, the ability to navigate water and land with ease, the agility to skillfully maneuver a ball or a racket or the strength to ride a horse. All of this demands a connection of the mind and body that is just now being explored by scientists.

Beneath and beyond the physical appearance of an athlete there is resilience and persistence, strength that goes beyond blood, bone and tissue. There, lingering beneath the skulls of every athlete, there are minds keenly aware and finely tuned to their crafts. Their skills are so remarkably detailed that they can tell with astounding accuracy simply by the positioning of a ball within a player’s hand, the position of the racket, or the angle of the blade of a hockey stick whether an attempt to score will be successful.

But does that wiring extend further, and actually make them better functioning humans in areas outside of athletics? Some scientists are saying yes, according to a Scientific American article.

The mental advantage of strengthening the mind-body connection, the value of anticipation, extends far from the rinks, gyms, fields and courts where they are frequently exercised.

The research over the last few years will help scientists compare other people who perform at similarly high levels: dancers, musicians, yoga masters.

“This research also provides a unique context for studying novel and important questions about the human mind, such as how the mind and body work together to rewire brain circuits over years of practice,” according to the article, including what the brain is actually capable of accomplishing when functioning at its highest level both physically and mentally.

A greater understanding of the flexibility of the brain will be possible and could explain why some people are adept at some activities and not others. As mankind strives to answer the great mysteries of the universe, it does almost seem ironic that one of the greatest is right beneath our noses. How are people able to train their minds? How are they able to have such heightened awareness and skill in certain areas? That supreme focus is essential to success in sports, life and business.

As Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “One is not born into the world to do everything, but to do something."

But doing that one thing to an expert level can impact all areas of your life.

Previous research focused almost exclusively on studying the athlete with regard to their selected sport. Findings show that athletes have more accurate and faster recall about plays from their selected sport, are significantly more efficient at searching sport-specific scenes for information, and are better at anticipating actions of opponents and the results of those actions.

Multiple studies reveal their great ability for anticipation and higher accuracy than people who simply observe the sport. It takes actual participation – playing – in order to have that ability.

“What we still don’t know, though, is how and under what conditions the athlete brain learns anticipation,” per the article.

Hours and hours of practice may rewire the brain pathways specifically for the mental demands of certain sports, but is it a matter of the length of practice or is it more about how a person practices?

“The expertise literature suggests that it is both how you practice and how much you practice, yet there is little to no brain-based evidence for how to optimize learning an athletic skill,” according to Scientific American.

It is a burgeoning field of scientific discovery: does the participation in athletics actually sharpen the mind overall?

I say yes and I also say that the increased speed of decision making and responses to stimuli outside of sports could also be linked to the confidence developed by actively working toward a goal and becoming adept at something.