Book Review: Hypnosis for Running – Training your mind to maximise your running performances By Adam Eason

I don’t think I have ever met another sports man or woman, from any sport, who didn’t think that mental strength, mental power and mental qualities played a key part in performance not only for themselves but for others in their sport too. Yet, if you asked me how many people I knew who had a planned mental training programme running in parallel with their physical training schedule, I would raise only a few of the fingers on one hand! I wonder why this is? Possibly because 99% of the material available about ‘training’, in print and on the web, only covers physical training. So we are overwhelmed with all manner of advise and learned articles on all aspects of how to play better or run faster and longer but almost nothing on the all important mental aspects.

Now that has all changed with the publishing of the book Hypnosis for Running – Training your mind to maximise your running performances by Adam Eason – hypnotherapist, author, experienced marathon runner and UKA Coach . This is a significant work and will go some way to addressing the paucity of literature geared to enable runners to maximise their mental performance. Make no mistake these 367 pages are geared to runners wanting to take practical steps to develop a mental training programme covering all aspects of improving their physical performance through improved thought processes. This is the kind of book you will always have on your bed-side table ready to dip into any of its 18 chapters.

There are extensive chapters on setting goals, understanding of hypnosis, runner’s internal dialogue, relaxing, banishing excuses, getting in the zone, as well as suggestions for formulating a mental training programme to run a long side your physical training plans. In particular I thought the chapters on ‘Belief of a Runner’ and ‘The Mindful Runner’ were the best material I have ever read on those subjects. I mentioned that this was very much a practical book that runners will use on a daily and weekly basis – a constant source of ideas and reference.

In these pages there are countless suggestions for self-hypnosis sessions to try and not only whilst sitting comfortably at home. Adam, an accomplished marathon runner himself, is proud of the fact that this book is very much research-based and not just his own ideas, although he does provide those too. Practising self-hypnosis whilst actually running is also covered and this is an area I will use a great deal myself in my extreme ultra endurance runs. Adam’s practical approach to using self- hypnosis comes across in all aspects of this book and that is one of the reasons I feel that this is such a useful book for us runners to have access to.

William Sichel