Optimal performance in sport is demanding because of the high level of requirements it leverages on, both in the physical and in the metal domain. The double nature of the athlete's commitment – physical and mental – has relevant implications and poses specific challenges both in training and during competitions. Athletes not only have to develop and master the skills for their sports, but they must also be able to express them during competitions, when load and stress are higher.
To reach top performance, athletes must train with commitment and perseverance. Obstacles to this may be boredom, lack of motivation, distractions, anxiety, fear and stress.
During competitions, performance may be sub-optimal due to negative emotions or thoughts (e.g., anxiety, fear, expectations, lack of self-confidence or of concentration) which may be triggered by ongoing situations or events (e.g., athlete's mistakes, opponents' actions, trainer's or teammates' behaviors) and can be often related to past experiences. Nevertheless, as it became evident in psychological research, the mechanism through which negative emotions and thoughts affect performance is not directly related to their presence or to their origin, rather to the capability of athletes to deal with them, in order to preserve motivation and focus. Surprisingly, a step towards the achievement of this goal is avoiding to control emotions and thoughts [1].
We can think of emotions as adaptive biological strategies (innate and acquired) that tackle specific contexts and events. They play a fundamental role in identifying a situation and in orchestrating and triggering a response to it, activating physiological responses and driving our thoughts and behaviors. As emotions are strictly embedded in the functioning of our nervous system and have the power to take control of our thoughts, trying to control them by thinking will lead, most probably, to failure. Not only we cannot win against emotions, but the effort to control them moves us away from the task, with negative effects on performance, and the inability to succeed in taming emotions worsens things even further. Indeed, in the last decades a progressively increasing amount of evidence has accumulated about mindfulness and acceptance, fostered through meditation, as an effective way to manage negative emotions and thoughts [2,3]. As stated by Gardner and Moore [4]: “It is not the presence or absence of negative thoughts, physiological arousal, or emotions such as anxiety or anger that predicts performance outcomes; rather, it is the degree to which an individual performer can accept these experiences and remain attentionally and behaviorally engaged in the performance task”.
In the scientific literature, mindfulness is a term used to mean both the training to achieve a mindful state and the state itself [5]. Here, we refer to mindfulness following Jon Kabat-Zinn definition, according to whom it means paying attention on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally [6]; we call meditation the training practice.
Through meditation, we become aware of our thoughts and emotions and we learn to accept them without judging them, living what is happening in the present moment. For athletes, this means to stay focused on what is relevant for the task.
Meditation may contribute to optimal performance in sport due to its effects on the psychological dimensions relevant to the acquisition and expression of skills [7,8]. For instance, meditation may enhance attention [9,10], improve emotion management [11–13], stress reduction [14–16] and can help in coping with fatigue and pain [17].
Various studies reported that meditation practice may improve performance in different sports [18,19] and proposed approaches based on meditation as a form of mental training ([20–24]). As many factors contribute to sport results both in the single athlete and at the inter-individual level, the impact of meditation on single factors contributing to performance is difficult to disentangle. The aim of our study is to verify whether the positive effects of meditation training in sport may result also from the improvement of basic skills which contribute to athletes' performance. For this reason, we chose to focus on body balance, a key skill for sport performance [25,26], and to investigate if meditation enhances its acquisition and control in ordinary and challenging situations.