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Show Sports psychologist to speak Thursday Sports psychologist Gregory Raiport, M.D., Ph.D., will be featured fea-tured in a special soup and salad seminar to be presented by Benchmark Ben-chmark Regional Hospital in Woods Cross on Thursday, March 14, at 12:30 p.m. Dr. Raiport received his degree in sports psychology from the National Na-tional Research Institute of Physical Physic-al Culture in Moscow, and worked on the Soviet Olympic staff as a sports psychologist for the 1976 games. He has lectured to many medical groups in the U.S. on a variety of medical and sports related re-lated topics, including "Techniques "Techni-ques for Performance Enhancement." Enhance-ment." Dr. Raiport is a firm believer that performance enhancement techniques techni-ques can be beneficial for anybody, not just athletes. One of three athletes suffer from stress, Raiport said. The pressures they face, in his view, are (1) physical phy-sical ("they're performing at the edge of their limits"), (2) psychological psycholo-gical ("they must make quick decisions deci-sions under tension") and (3) social ("they know millions are watching them perform for their country"). "An athlete, with the help of a psychologist, can learn to gain control con-trol over blood pressure and muscle mus-cle tone as well as emotions and moods," Raiport said. "He can learn to choose a mood for any ' occasion like choosing a tie. Every Ev-ery person has an optimal mood for his optimal performance. Some need to be angry, one needs to be happy, one needs to be afraid." A British swimmer went faster when he pictured himself being chased by a shark, Raiport said. "But another swimmer would panic and wouldn't be able to swim at all. Each person has his own motivation." How does an athlete find it? One way, Raiport said, is for him to count his pulse to find his level of emotional arousal. "If he has the best results when his pulse is at 130, the next time he runs he should bring his pulse to 130." Once, Raiport said, he worked . with a skeet shooter who was having hav-ing a bad day. "His pulse was 95' and I knew his optimal level was 1 20. So I made him run and got him angry. His pulse went up to 1 23 and he began shooting very well." Raiport was a boxer, and boxing was the sport that inspired his interest in-terest in sports psychology. He once saw a weaker boxer beat a bigger, stronger one and he wondered won-dered why. "I decided it was the mental factor," he said. Raiport left his family in the Soviet Union when he went to New York in 1977 on a visa he said he got with the help of a Soviet general. gener-al. "Technically, I defected," he said in an interview, "although it didn't look like it. I helped the general's gen-eral's son get over a speech defect and he helped me get the visa as a favor." "A , ' I l GREGORY RAIPORT, M.D., PhD. Along with the Soup and Salad Seminar on Thursday, Dr. Raiport will also present a special training course at the hospital, where the performance enhancement techniques techni-ques will be presented and taught. The cost for the special course is $65 and will last seven hours beginning begin-ning at 10 a.m. For further information contact Gary Totland or Rick Spohn at 298-2844. 298-2844. (Portions of this release were taken from the Jan. 25, 1984 issue of the Los Angeles Times). |