Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Are you ever finding yourself really tight and tense? How about unable to fall asleep the night before a big game? Well, this simple relaxation exercise might be helpful to athletes struggling with being tense.

Progressive muscle relaxation (also known as PR) is a series of exercises that involve contracting a specific muscle group, holding that contraction, and then relaxing the muscle. These exercises progress from one muscle group to another throughout the whole body, normally in a top to bottom pattern or vice versa (head to feet, or feet to head). The goals of PR is 1) to help an athlete become aware of what tension in their body feels like and where it is most present, and 2) to learn to relax tense muscles. It is important to focus on what the absence of tension feels like and gaining awareness that this relaxation can be controlled voluntarily by tensing and relaxing different muscle groups.

Upon learning PR athletes will be able to spot and release the tension before it causes performance problems, fatigue, headaches, cramps etc.  As with other mental skills and exercises, PR should be done regularly to gain the practice and long lasting benefits. Initially, it is suggested to do PR about 20 minutes a day and then decrease the frequency as the skill becomes more automatic. It is not recommended to perform in a long PR session directly before a performance because it can cause an athlete to become too relaxed. PR would be more beneficial the night before a big performance or regular practice.

Once an athlete is comfortable with PR athletes can begin to incorporate shorter abbreviated active PR exercises into their daily performances.  Keep an eye out for more examples in future blog posts. Abbreviated active PR is a shorter version of PR that may focus on one or two muscle groups. For example, if an athlete notices that he/she holds a lot of tension in their shoulders they can engage in active PR pregame and during their performance by tensing and relaxing just their shoulder muscles.

The following videos are a walk through of progressive muscle relaxation. Once an athlete begins to get comfortable with PR, he/she can engage in PR without the help of a script or video. Do not tense and relax injured muscles. This is meant to be a comfortable exercise, do not try to push your body beyond its limits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6053dnI4Rxg

This is a true progressive relaxation video, in a top down pattern. (20 mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFwCKKa--18

This progressive relaxation focuses only on big muscle groups. (10 mins)

Campbell Query

Bowling Green State University