The Importance of Mental Training

"I´ve trained my mind and my body will follow!"

"My heart, my mind will carry my body when my limbs are too weak!"

Almost everybody once heard a parent, a teacher, a mentor say: "whatever you are dreaming of...if you believe in it, it can come true!"
Well...and almost everybody thought: "yeah,sure..."

Today i wanna give you a short description from a scientific standpoint, why those people were actually right.
Shocked? Well, you got every right to be...

Our mind is something, we do not understand very well yet.
There are so many links in our central nervous system, our brain, we got no idea how it works, but more importantly how it forms itself through input from the outside and how it can adapt itself.
How does our conciousness work?
We know to a good part, where certain functions like hearing, seeing, smelling, emotions, rational thinking, arts, etc. are mainly(!) located but how exactly they work or even interact... NO IDEA!


Some things we know and i picked some of them which i consider important to mental training.

Before we even think of a movement, e.g. using a light-switch, areas of our brain already processed the necessary information...
Our brain analyses the information it got, how we did such a thing in the past, how we, the switch, the rest of the room are positioned in the surrounding space.
After that areas responsible for movement, planing those as well as actually performing them, are activated and your brain assesses the the situation, compares it to former situations when you used a light-switch, compares the necesarry movements, searches for known motoric patterns.
Finally we come to the concious decision and execution of the movement: during the whole movement, you are constantly assessing the situation and cross checking with known situations. Am i gonna reach the switch? Is the angle correct? When do i have to stop the movement? WHich muscle fibers of which muscle with which intensity have to be activated to get there in the right angle and with the right pressure to activate the switch but not damaging it?

Why do you think I´m telling you all this?

Because: before you actually perform a movement, any movement, you already activated all the necessary brain-regions to do it.


When i perform autohypnosis, it is a key element, to imagine as many details as possible.
Powerlifters do the same thing before their main lift. They call it psyche-up. They imagine themselves doing the lift correctly, easily and full of energy over and over...
Why?
That way, they create a reality in their head, where they already lifted the weight.
With every run through this mental lift, it becomes more and more real to more and more of their brain/conciousness.
When they finally have to perform the "real" lift, they already did it 50+ times i their head and 80% of them already knows they will do it.

The power of positive thinking.

if you got any questions, feel free to post a question or send me an email.

focus, be creative but never forget to stop and smell the roses.
harry