Mindfulness for Student Athletes: A Workbook to Help Teens Reduce Stress and Enhance Performance

Stay in the moment, stay in the game! With this fun and engaging workbook for young athletes, you’ll find practical ways to cope with stress and improve your performance, no matter what sport you play.

If you’re like many other high school or college students, you probably feel pressure to perform at a high level—both in the classroom and on the field. Unfortunately, this pressure can cause lots of stress and anxiety. To make matters worse, you may find it difficult to effectively manage all of these demands on your time, energy, and health. This is where mindfulness can help.

Mindfulness allows you to stay present, focus, and be calm with your thoughts and emotions, no matter how stressful life gets. In Mindfulness for Student Athletes, you’ll find practical and tactical ways to cope with stress and anxiety in the moment, prevent stress in the future, and experience more satisfaction and enjoyment while playing sports. You’ll also find proven-effective tools to naturally enhance your performance.

The mindfulness skills outlined in this workbook will not only help you on the field—but in life as well. You’ll be able to take what you’ve learned and apply it to any situation, from job interviews to scoring a touchdown. What a gift to have!

Gina M. Biegel, MA, LMFT, is a psychotherapist, researcher, speaker, and author in the San Francisco Bay Area who specializes in mindfulness-based work with adolescents. She is founder of Stressed Teens, which has been offering mindfulness-based stress reduction for teens (MBSR-T) to adolescents, families, schools, professionals, and the community for over a decade. She created MBSR-T to help teens in a large HMO’s outpatient department of child and adolescent psychiatry who were not receiving relief or amelioration of their physical and psychological symptoms with the use of a multitude of other evidence-based practices. An expert and pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based approaches to youth, she is author of Be Mindful and Stress Less, The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens (first and second edition), and the Be Mindful Card Deck for Teens. She also has a mindfulness practice audio CD, Mindfulness for Teens, to complement the MBSR-T program. She provides intensive ten-week online trainings worldwide and works with teens and families individually and in groups. Her work has been featured on The Today Show and CNN, and in Reuters, The New York Times, and Tricycle. For more information, visit her website at www.stressedteens.com.

Todd H. Corbin, CPC, is a former multisport student athlete and youth baseball coach, longtime avid runner and sports enthusiast, mindfulness teacher, professional speaker, certified parenting coach, and parent to two teen athletes. Mistakenly labeled as learning disabled in first grade left Todd with very low self-esteem and many social and emotional scars. As a result, he turned his attention to helping others on ways to use mindful awareness to build self-confidence and resilience, overcome stress and anxiety, and enhance performance. He spent twenty-one years in higher education publishing and was an instructor at Lakeland Community College in Ohio for twelve years teaching courses in stress management, peak performance, communication skills, mindfulness, and meditation.

Todd’s overall knowledge of mindfulness, stress management, and meditation is extensive. He has been practicing and teaching mindfulness since 1994, integrating the most current research in neuroscience and optimal performance. He received formal training in mindfulness from many of the leading experts and programs in the field. Todd also received personal training in meditation and overall well-being directly from best-selling authors Deepak Chopra and Neale Donald Walsch which led to the creation of a mindfulness-based stress relief curriculum for children/teens taught for three years at The Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, CA. For more information on Todd, visit his website at www.toddcorbin.com.

Gina M. Biegel, MA, LMFT, is a psychotherapist, researcher, speaker, and author in the San Francisco Bay Area who specializes in mindfulness-based work with adolescents. She is founder of Stressed Teens, which has been offering mindfulness-based stress reduction for teens (MBSR-T) to adolescents, families, schools, professionals, and the community for over a decade. She created MBSR-T to help teens in a large HMO's outpatient department of child and adolescent psychiatry who were not receiving relief or amelioration of their physical and psychological symptoms with the use of a multitude of other evidence-based practices. An expert and pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based approaches to youth, she is author of Be Mindful and Stress Less, The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens (first and second edition), and the Be Mindful Card Deck for Teens. She also has a mindfulness practice audio CD, Mindfulness for Teens, to complement the MBSR-T program. She provides intensive ten-week online trainings worldwide and works with teens and families individually and in groups. Her work has been featured on The Today Show and CNN, and in Reuters, The New York Times, and Tricycle. For more information, visit her website at www.stressedteens.com.

Todd H. Corbin, CPC, is a former multisport student athlete and youth baseball coach, longtime avid runner and sports enthusiast, mindfulness teacher, professional speaker, certified parenting coach, and parent to two teen athletes. Mistakenly labeled as learning disabled in first grade left Todd with very low self-esteem and many social and emotional scars. As a result, he turned his attention to helping others on ways to use mindful awareness to build self-confidence and resilience, overcome stress and anxiety, and enhance performance. He spent twenty-one years in higher education publishing and was an instructor at Lakeland Community College in Ohio for twelve years teaching courses in stress management, peak performance, communication skills, mindfulness, and meditation.

Todd's overall knowledge of mindfulness, stress management, and meditation is extensive. He has been practicing and teaching mindfulness since 1994, integrating the most current research in neuroscience and optimal performance. He received formal training in mindfulness from many of the leading experts and programs in the field. Todd also received personal training in meditation and overall well-being directly from best-selling authors Deepak Chopra and Neale Donald Walsch which led to the creation of a mindfulness-based stress relief curriculum for children/teens taught for three years at The Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, CA. For more information on Todd, visit his website at www.toddcorbin.com.