How hypnosis brings the best out of Earls
Irish wing is breaking new ground in his pursuit of excellence, he tells Daniel Schofield
The result was long since settled as the clock ticked towards the 80-minute mark at the Aviva Stadium with Ireland leading Italy 56-19. Hunting a try to take them pass the 60-point barrier, Joey Carbery lined up for a long pass but was expertly picked off by Mattia Bellini. With a sizeable head start and as a wing, Bellini was not going to be caught.
That was until the figure of Keith Earls appeared at the bottom of the screen. Screaming across from the opposite wing, Earls eventually scragged Bellini inside his own 22. Along with that Finn Russell pass, it ranks as the most jaw-dropping moment of this year’s Natwest Six Nations Championship.
At 30 years old, Earls is in the best form of his career. Asked to what he attributed this, Earls revealed that he has been working with famous hypnotist Keith Barry. “I am just trying to get them one per cents, which seems to be working,” Earls said. “I don’t want to get into the detail but he knows the brain better than anyone and just in terms of visualisation and stuff like that.”
In an age when there are only the tiniest differences between the fitness levels of the majority of elite sports teams, the biggest scope for improvement lies in the brain. Most athletes recognise this. Rugby players such as England full-back Anthony Watson openly discuss using sports psychologists. A hypnotist is just the next stage in brain training.
Barry has many sporting clients, but Earls is among the first to publicly acknowledge their relationship. Barry has a range of techniques depending on the individual client. Sometimes he will hypnotise them; on other occasions, the client will be awake as he uses neuro-linguistic programming to embed certain messages. Either way he is working to reprogram the subconscious mind. “Most people have heard of the subconscious, but they do not know what it does,” Barry told The Daily Telegraph. “The subconscious mind regulates your autonomic nervous system which is your breathing, your blood flow, your heart rate, which are directly linked to moments of stress and anxiety.
“Under hypnosis, I can teach people how to deal with those moments by using what I call anchors and triggers. An anchor can be a visual or physical stimulus and once that is triggered, they can naturally release endorphins, feel-good hormones, which reverses the effect of stress chemicals coming into their body. That means the athlete can continue to perform to the best of their ability rather than allowing a mistake or external factor to distract them.”
Barry practises what he preaches. For the birth of his second child, his wife underwent a ‘hypno-birth’ relying purely on hypnosis rather than drugs for the pain management.
“Hypnosis is not quackery anymore,” Barry said. “Visualisation under hypnosis can be as good as if not better than the actual physical training. There’s a famous basketball experiment where they got two teams of equal abilities. One team stopped physical training for a month and just did mental training while the other team did its normal training. They had a shoot-out at the end and the team that was just training the mind ended up thrashing the other one.”
Barry’s specialist technique is reverse visualisation, where he gets athletes to imagine their ideal scenario from back to front so in a rugby case they would be catching the ball and passing the ball in reverse. “When you do those things backwards you tend not to make any mistakes on a subconscious level,” Barry said. “If you do it forward then you may replay an old game where you have missed a tackle or dropped a ball.”
However, Barry denies he has the ability to make any player into a world-beater. “All credit has to go to Keith,” Barry said. “There are big gains to be had but it all depends on how hard you are willing to work and Keith has put all the work in himself.”
Earls retains his place on the right wing for Ireland’s match against Scotland. Coach Joe Schmidt has made two changes with tighthead prop Furlong returning while centre Garry Ringrose replaces the injured Chris Farrell.