On 11th April 2021, MAD Lions confronted off against Rogue for the fifth game of a best-of-five League of Legends series. The stage was the LEC Spring Finals. Each squads beat G2 Esports - by all accounts, a European tremendous-workforce - throughout their runs to the ultimate, MAD Lions in the upper bracket and Rogue within the decrease.
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The 2 finalists were carefully matched. The battle between two dominant junglers - Impressed from Rogue. Elyoya from MAD Lions - typified the neck-and-neck bout. This was the penultimate match of an intensely competitive collection, in one of the world’s toughest regions: who can be crowned European champion?
In such moments, outcomes are decided at the margins.
Mindfulness for peak performance
Each MAD Lions and Rogue imagine that such margins will be stretched with mindfulness - the ability for their players to remain composed and make sound selections. Ismael Pedraza, Efficiency Coach at Rogue, cut his teeth in sport psychology. His fondness for mindfulness practices has two separate roots.
“I [completed] two Master’s levels: Sport Psychology and Diagnostic Intervention, in Finland and in Leipzig. And of course in sport psychology, you get to see totally different approaches to performance … We started [studying about] this new method referred to as acceptance behavioural therapy, which relies on mindfulness approaches.
“But personally I acquired into mindfulness because of my very own athletic career. I used to be playing at an elite stage in football back in Colombia, after which one way or the other I ended up coming across meditation techniques and mindfulness, so I started to read a lot on that.”
What exactly is mindfulness meditation? In keeping with Pedraza, “mindfulness itself is listening to the current second, in a non-judgmental manner.” Mindfulness meditation, then, is the practising of mindfulness abilities, which itself can take many varieties.
“It goes within the direction of some strategies or methods that help you to be in the current moment. You've got formal. Informal approaches to this. More informal approaches that we use a lot [at Rogue] are, for instance, attentional methods like attempting to change your physiology, like by sluggish-paced respiration … Trying to assist gamers be higher at emotional management, let’s say.
“One of the formal approaches for mindfulness is doing periods where we direct them in direction of attention-focused strategies which goal to show them how thoughts work - how emotions work. You've gotten a thought - possibly a unfavorable thought - but they're studying to know that they aren't their thoughts, right? They aren't their feelings.”
Deceptively simple as it could sound, simply noticing ideas or emotions as they arise - non-judgmentally - can have profound results on wellbeing. Countless studies have highlighted the constructive results of mindfulness meditation. One study conducted by researchers out of Oregon and Munich concluded that meditation, amongst a truckload of different benefits, ‘has potential for the treatment of clinical disorders and would possibly facilitate the cultivation of a healthy thoughts and elevated wellbeing’. One other research by Katherine Weare at the University of Exeter discovered that ‘mindfulness can contribute on to the event of cognitive and efficiency skills and govt function’. Government function is the mix of essential mental abilities, like reminiscence and self-management.
The literature on mindfulness meditation is in depth for athletes, too, although few research have analysed esports athletes. “Mindfulness has been found to be related to improved athletic performance and propensity to achieve stream states,” it says in a 2014 article printed within the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology.
Building resilience
Jake Ainsworth, who works with MAD Lions gamers to improve their physical wellbeing, operates in lockstep with Martina Cubric, the team’s Sport Psychologist. As Ainsworth advised The Esports Journal: “We’ve taken slightly different paths to get to the point we’re at, however we’re very much aligned on what we’re trying to do with the gamers.”
What's it they are attempting to do with MAD Lions’s League of Legends players? To Cubric and Ainsworth, perhaps most vital is constructing resilience.
“I think with any sport, there’s a component of discomfort that comes with it,” Ainsworth stated. “Like skiing. It’s horrible to be in those boots. There’s impression all the time. Even stuff like table tennis.
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