(From the book TAPPING by David Feinstein and Donna Eden):
Greg Warburton is one of the first sports performance trainers to have systematically used acupoint tapping to help individual athletes and entire teams perform more consistently at their best. Warburton began his career as a counselor at a camp for troubled teens. He loved working as a therapist with young people but found that “talking wasn’t enough.” After learning to integrate tapping into his counseling, he utilized it as “a creative and effective language” that goes beyond the reach of just talk. Meanwhile, he struck up a friendship with Dan Spencer, the pitching coach for the local college in Corvallis, Oregon, when they would run into each other while working out at the gym. It occurred to Warburton that he could apply the same principles that were proving so valuable with his young clients to help athletes. It took two years for Spencer to warm up to the idea, but finally, he courageously allowed Warburton to introduce the strange-looking technique to the pitchers and catchers for whom he had direct responsibility.
Spencer’s team, the Oregon State University (OSU) baseball team, was already nationally recognized. The previous year, they had made it to the College World Series, a Division 1 tournament in which the country’s eight top college baseball teams face one another, but they were quickly eliminated. After Warburton’s training in 2006, the OSU team not only returned to the College World Series, they won it. And they won it again the next year. In that year, 2007, freshman pitcher Jorge Reyes was seen on national television (ESPN) tapping acupoints in the dugout between innings, leading to puzzled commentary by the sportscasters. Reyes won two games and Most Valuable Player of the entire series. Coach Spencer was named National Pitching Coach of the Year and observed that to get “to the ‘promised land,’ which in college baseball is the World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, coaches have to adapt and be willing to experiment with new methods and techniques.” Bringing in Warburton was an experiment for him. His conclusion: “The acupoint tapping added another piece to the championship puzzle. It’s been a great tool for us.”
In 2010, the head coach of the OSU wrestling team invited five of his starting wrestlers to work with Warburton. Most athletes are still more interested in physical rather than mental training, and only one of the five invited, Chad Hanke, contacted Warburton. The next year, Hanke made it to the University Nationals and won six consecutive matches to take the championship. He defeated six All-American wrestlers, including the previous year’s National Champion. Of the five OSU wrestlers originally referred to Warburton, only Hanke went on to excel, winning two University National Championships and later wrestling for Team USA in the Olympics. Did tapping make the difference? Hanke believes it was a critical element in giving him an edge, stating in a televised interview that his work with Warburton “really helped me achieve at the next level.”
As Warburton became better known outside of Oregon, he was invited in 2012 by the head coach of the University of Arizona varsity baseball team to work with some of the pitchers who were having control problems. Warburton soon found himself introducing acupoint tapping to the entire team. They took the College World Series that year, winning all ten post-season games.
In 2018, Warburton worked with rower/sculler, Catherine Widgery, who went on to win the single scull U.S. National Rowing Championship, placing second (by less than one second) at the Euro-Nationals Rowing Championship, and winning the World Championship. Four years later, Widgery contacted Warburton again, just before competing in the 2022 World Championships. She let him know she was caught up in “thought attacks.” She said that trying to “think my way to a good place” wasn’t working. She was just days away from competing in the 2022 World Championships. During renewed training with Warburton, she said in an e-mail:
I can feel a palpable shift in the way energy is moving through my body. I would hardly have believed it was possible to feel such a change. No worries about my hip. Though I’ve had a couple of moments when it seemed terrible, I just worked with my tapping and consciously allowing my body to relax and heal.
Widgery went on to win three gold medals in the World Championships. In a note of thanks, she said, “I’ve been doing a LOT of tapping. . . . Once again, thank you so much for your great work with me!”
Of course, in all four of these vignettes, acupoint tapping was only one part of an effort that included exceptional innate ability, dedication, training, and coaching. But in each case, Warburton was called in to bring an individual or team with great potential to exceed their past achievements. As all athletes and coaches know, that does not happen automatically. In each case, tapping was the new piece that elevated their performance. The athletes’ innate abilities, their strong determination, cutting-edge training, and superb coaching stayed relatively constant, yet in each case, after introducing tapping, they exceeded their past performances significantly. These vignettes are consistent with most of the stories Warburton has accumulated during his career. He has, over the years, been connected to 10 national championships.
1 Discussions and e-mail exchanges with Warburton, along with his book, are the sources for his stories, techniques, and principles recounted throughout this chapter.
