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www.MOSTmag.com || FITNESS MAG A ZINE || 123countries. Then shifting to playing football in high school and through college, so sports have always been a part of my life. My soccer coach at eight years old would have us meditate, he was way ahead of the times and my football coach in high school would also have us meditate before games, for some reason that was the people that I seemed to attract in my life. So in college I learned more about meditation and when I was working on my master degree, my one teacher who happen to be an ex football player made me teach the whole class how to meditate. So mediation has always been a part of my upbringing and as I got into my coaching career I enjoyed watching Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bears. He wrote a book called Sacred Hoops that was all about getting his players into the Zen philosophy, that he claimed would allow his players to let go of their egos and play together as a team. They were all super stars in their own right and this allowed them to drop the super stardom and gel as a team. So that began to mold my own coaching technique creating meditation around visualization and meditation to relax. It allowed my players to work together, support each other, hold each other accountable and lift each other up. Then it was always guys learning instead of fighting for the position and when their opportunity came they were just ready.CM: What is the connection with yoga and sports that you see now?Sid: The big connection is two modalities that you look at; one is the yoga practice, which breaks down into two parts. The first is to get someone revved up, to get the body open and ready to go perform which I call a pre game routine. Then there is the post game routine, which is the recovery after the game; to get you ready to go back in. When playing sports or lifting weights you are tearing the muscles all of the time and so there needs to be something to build them back up. Also, the whole asana practice; people need to create the flexibility to create longevity. Then there is the new realm I see taking place and that is the meditation of the mind, the mind part of the game. Walter Payton once said that the game is eighty percent mental and twenty percent physical, and so when your mind is open you have an opportunity to open your practice, the game or your performance level even more. The work that we are doing I call mind field meditation, if you look at it like a field it%u2019s opening up the field so that you have the full ground to play on, if you only see in part of the field that%u2019s the only part you can play with. CM: Through yoga, what can you bring forth in an athlete or team that is different then other yoga teachers?Sid: The number one thing is having played sports and coached football for so long, there is a mentality and there is a language and I feel many yogis miss that with the athlete. The other thing I do different for example is when I worked with Towson University we did twenty minutes of coaching their mind that supported the goal of >>>