What do you expect from sports anyway? Are you in top mental form for your next golf game? Or do you give a tennis opponent a run for her money? You may be a fast- skilled - strong -and experienced tennis player or golfer … or you may have just played your first game. In either case, if you expect more from your brain -you’ll be surprised how it kicks in for new smooth and controlled shots that can land your scores in a winner’s circle.

In spite of a recent bout with cancer, Marjorie Brewer at 60, still swings a driver like a pro and putts like a metronome. She’s out four times a week, near the grounds of her new senior living residence. People far younger struggle to keep up - and it’s a good game when you can. In one of the persistent mysteries of an aging brain, Marjorie found there are tremendous health care benefits to doing what she loves most – golf. But I see far more than bodily health in Marjorie’s high-performance mind. What she expects - she lands with precision again and again.

At 58, Murray Jensen expected golf to help his brain to slow the effects of cardiovascular disease, which is central to many of the symptoms of old age. Murray’s doctor tells him that he seems to be slowing or delaying and likely even preventing many mental changes that could result from his frail health.

By expecting your brain to be fast and strong and alert, you actually build new neuron pathways to make that happen. Did you know the brain demands 21 percent of the entire oxygen to your body? Not surprisingly, when you move more, you enrich that supply and add to your brain’s potential.

At Brain Boomer … we’ll look at ways that you can optimize your brainpower, and improve your sports’ scores, far more than most people realize. For example, my team won the recent District Rotary Annual Golf Tournament and New York, and we did it by expecting serotonin - the brain’s well-being hormone, to improve our golf scores to 4 under par.

Serotonin can open new ideas and possibilities for you, when you need it most. This hormone for well-being is essential to a good game and it is increased to the brain when you simply expect it to help you out. We deliberately built more serotonin - by wishing others well when they were walking to the tee - by imaging great shots whenever we went into a swing - and by refusing to focus on the mistakes of a bad shot, in favor of the lesson learned for the next controlled swing.

Can you see how sports may be good for your brain - but a high performance brain is delightfully good for your scores? What’s been your experience?