Mental Reps

You’ve heard us say it over and over again. “It starts with the mind.” Everything from physical pain, planning, success, failure, emotion, creativity, physical actions, and beyond are first interpreted in the mind. If you don’t get the mind part right, the output cannot be right.

I’d argue that most people ignore mental development so much that virtually anything can train their mind for the better. A good dose of adversity would do just about everyone a lot of good, for example. This can come from a smack in the face, managing an impossible task, a tough training session, cold water, and early alarm clock or a combination of all of the above. Hell, these days sudoku can be someone’s peak stressor (but that’s a topic for a whole other conversation).

Mental growth can come with less sting, too. Visualization, breathing work, and meditation are key practices that are thousands of years in the making. Since the massive impact that visualization and breathing exercises have had on my career since college, I’ve admittedly drifted away from my practice when my baseball playing days subsided.

Former teammate and current DEUCE Gym student, Nick McCoy, gave me a nudge several months ago to dive back into the mental game with him. The approach? The Headspace App.

I’m not a big iPhone app guy, but this has changed the entire practice of my daily life. Since everything “starts with the mind” these kinds of practices can have a profound effect of everything else in your life. Every morning for ten minutes I meditate with the app and as a result I can see with X-Ray vision and can perform super human feats of mental acuity (or so it seems).

I dare you to try it!

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach