Rare tips by a road player By Carleton Travis©

Quality Control and Marketing Consultant BRAIN DEAD, BRAIN HICKUP, CHOKING Why we suffer from them? How can we reduce these mysterious events that wreck our pool stroke? STRESS IS A LEARNED BEHAVIOR.  Choking is the natural reaction to powerful stress.   Anxiety can only be there when you are fearful of an upset, loss, looking foolish, or getting mentally and physically degraded.   Your intelligence recognizes this threat and causes brain chemical changes.   You can attack anxiety and be more affective in apositivedirection.   I want you to repeat these concepts until they are burnt into your brain: breathing, rhythm to music, taking control, and avoiding medications.   Our minds are usually far too lazy to seriously examine a shot from several perspectives and take the proper steps to set into motion the correct physical responses.   Remember, emotions is a rush of chemistry injected into our naturally lazy physical responses to situations.   Why approach the shot with body slumped and feet dragging when you can react and think better with a cheerful spring in your set?  
Fear causes you to choke, physically your jaw, neck,and shoulder muscles unanimously tighten to suck your head inside of your torso like a turtle.   Its an involuntary fear reaction to an exaggerated perception of failure.   The poke or miscue is inadequate in speed, English, direction, and released prematurely when you weren’t ready.  
Being in control of your game is an illusion.   We only think we're in control.   Without primary steps (which we must follow) control decisions would be incorrect and disastrous.
1. Understand you create this medical & mental problem.
2. You must have the skills.
3. You must rhythmically perform through the fear and anxiety. All three controls must happen and you can’t leave anything out.
4. Bad habits are negative.   You can become addicted to the reverse of good positive thinking.
Self-esteem must be high even when you are the underdog.   Destructive chemicals are contained within your body and are released into your brain.   This affects your ways of analyzing problems and co-ordinating movements.  
If you procrastinate: step back, breath, and go through the basic steps again.   Talk to yourself, enjoy the moment of concentration, and revel in small accomplishments.  
Change the quality of your thoughts Follow basic steps from beginning to end.   And you will avoid the discomfort and anxiety. You will avoid the resulting depression caused by missing.   Praise any positive attitudes by bragging.   Be proud of your self.   Positive and negative mental attitudes affect your physical health.   Negative reasoning can be avoided by bragging about your upcoming shot.   You’ll look great and put fear and anxiety into your opponents, if you accomplish a tough shot after pointing out the difficulty of it.  
It is important to slow down your bodily responses by slowly breathing and mentally lowering you heart rate.   These physical improvements reduce any perceived danger.  
All animals’’ freeze’’ by locking up their escape muscles in total panic, they urinate and unload their bowels when they perceive an overpowering danger.
REACTIONS of your muscles are much fasterthan the planned slower movements needed for a pool stroke.   These reactions can cause opposing muscles to lock up.   Muscles that want to go in one direction are not allowed to move freely, because the direction of the opposing muscles are pulling against the free movement.   This constitutes ‘’CHOKING UP’’and the result is an unplanned loss of efficiency and strength in the forward stroke and results in a bad shot with terrible position.   To make things worse you probably cramped up your shoulder,twisted your wrist, and tightened your fingers into a clamp-like vice.)
Try this physical solution :Medium slow breathing.    Do this four or five times.   It will help clean the blood of toxins and fully oxygenate your mind and muscles.
FEAR can do you harm by releasing chemicals intended to make your body “fight or flight” from danger.  These negative, lifesaving chemical surges can be longer lasting than desired and will JUST BEFORE you step up to shoot, stop your breath about half way and hold it.   This will stabilize your shoulder from swaying with your breath and heartbeat.  
What can spin you out of control? Extreme emotional swings, booze, drugs, stress, anxiety, fear and your immagined danger, and an attack to your EGO ( such as critical comments about your abilities ).
PRACTICE, REHEARSE, FOLLOW THE BASICS, THINK ABOUT THE RYTHME in your stroke and stress can’t creep into your game. Try setting up shots and MENTALLY HUMM A MUSICAL TUNE.   This relaxes you and allows your arm to do a mental dance to the rythme.   MUSIC helps to sooth the buildup of stress.   We all know what “BRAIN DEAD” is.   It's a loss of concentration at a critical moment during a series of mental steps to achieve a desired result.   This gap in the focusing process causes a sidetracking of energy in an undesired direction.   We also suffer a condition called "BRAIN HICKUP".   This happens when a “choke” occurs by causing normally smooth syncronized actions of muscles to clash and fight against opposing muscles.   It’s a burst of confused instructions from the brain to muscles.   Instead of each muscle getting an impulse to respond, all muscles get a message to react.   They yank in opposite directions and the result looks similar to robot-like spasms.   Underlying fear of failure has caused a” mental bowel movement which is embarassing to us and sets us up to over compensate and tighten up on future shots.   As the intensity of the fear builds up, the resulting lockup of muscles will be additionally magnified.  WE ARE NOW OUT OF CONTROL.   Our rythme section just commited suicide from overload.   We recover our composure, laugh at ourselves, call ourself a dummy and try to go on  NEW ADDED PROBLEM:  We just planted a negative seed deep in our brain that we are no longer able to be successfully in charge of our muscles.   It can be a downward spiral of lowered self confidence if we don't do something to recover our composure and self worth.  
A SOLUTION:  Concentrate your mind on a musical tune.    Music has a soothing effect on us.   As little children we were calmed down,lulled into happy sleep by loved ones by soft tunes.   We’ll never lose the tranquilizing response we learned as Talk out your “boogie men” that are holding you back.   Sharing these concepts with pool pals will benefit everyone and teaching others forces you to logically group your new found understandings.   Keep a dancing rythme in your stroke.   MUSIC TO PLAY POOL BYcan cleanse the mind and body of residual stresses. By Carleton TravisBy Carleton Travis©


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