Olympians Use Hypnosis

Categories: General
      Date: Feb 12, 2010
     Title: Olympians Use Hypnosis

Here's a great article from the SF Chronicle about the 2008 Summer Olympics and how top athletes use hypnosis to stay calm under amazing pressure.

Chronicle write Peter Fimrite wrote about the skeet shooting gold medalist:

"Vincent Hancock is a nervous person, who by his own admission simply cannot keep still.

But when everything was on the line Saturday and he had to hit two final shots to win the skeet shooting Olympic gold medal, he stepped up and calmly blew the whizzing disks out of the sky.

How does a jittery 19-year-old kid from Georgia keep cool under the intense pressure of an Olympic final when everyone around him is sweating bricks?

That's where Daniel Vitchoff steps in.

'I specialize in hypnosis,' said Vitchoff, a performance coach and sports psychologist hired to work with the U.S. shooting team. 'When you are shooting in the Olympics, it comes down to who can best perform under extreme pressure. Out there, everybody is as good as the next person. It's not a physical thing anymore. The difference between the best and the rest is the mental game.'"