The Hidden Secret

The Hidden Secret

Bowling, a sport in various different ways you roll or sometimes throw a circular object that can vary in weight at 10 wooden pins in the shape of a pyramid. Now as simple as this game seems it’s actually a lot more about being mentally strong then physically strong. This is why you don’t see too many pro bowlers who are big and muscular. Being a competitive bowler, I have to be mentally strong in order to keep up with my competitors.

I learned much of how I bowl today from a man named Vinny Atria. He is a bowler of overflowing talent; he has many accomplishments some bowlers may never achieve. He is a very nice man of about 52 yrs of age when I met him. I was in the freshman when I began working with him to perfect my physical form in bowling. We would practice once a week working on new things after which I was to go out and practice on my own to perfect what I had learned.

My coach Vinny Atria is one of my greatest teachers of many of the things I know today. He has helped me practice my physical form in bowling to perfection. He helped with all he could for my physical game and then told me that in order to take the next step you must be able master your mental game. He was very redundant on how important this is to be successful as a competitor. He provided me with a book called “In Pursuit of Excellence” written by Terry Orlick. With this book it launched my interest into the genre of Mental Training.

The first time I opened the book and read some of the first few chapters I thought it one of the most boring things I had ever read in my life. I thought that there was no way that this book could help me. It started off talking about a whole bunch of nonsense which I really didn’t understand and didn’t care to read about. I was only looking for what I thought would help me the most. Of course trying to just skim over words and even pages I really wasn’t getting the true messages out of each chapter. To fully comprehend what was being presented you had to have an open mind and be willing to attempt the exercises. Well, I didn’t actually end up reading a whole lot of it for about the first year that I had it. It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I finally challenged myself to finally read it and learn the actual lessons from the book.

I started reading about how to take positives out of everything you do, how to keep yourself from getting distracted from your performance, and being able to remain focused also called Zen. All of these chapters would have testimonials from champion athletes that described how they used what the main topic of the chapter was. Then after reading about how the best do it, the author mentions some small exercises you can try to do while you’re practicing your sport or even just lying in bed. What I found that I liked the most was that the exercises were really almost common sense but required a lot of focus