The Mental Edge

Notes from Kenneth Baum The Mental Edge: Maximize your Sports Potential with the Mind-Body Connection (New York: Perigree, 1999).

“… the most potent performance enhancer you have is the three pounds of gray matter located between your ears.” (p.5).

“… using your mind in way that will allow your body to do exactly what it already knows how to do. Too often athletes are crippled by what I call ‘analysis paralysis’.” (p.6). Mentally “standing back”.

“… move away from the analytical left side of your brain and let the more creative, visual right side take over.” (p.7)

“… learning to minimize your mind’s distracting and counterproductive messages and signals to your body. Essentially you’ll be conditioning your body to perform instinctively and unconsciously, guided by the feelings of success and confidence that you’ve already built into your mind and body, and automatically triggering the connections that make it possible for you to achieve at the highest possible level of performance. You’ll create a state of mind-body integration conducive to both a physical and a mental edge that will allow your mind to step back and let your body do what it has been prepared to do.” (p7)

“At the world-class level in particular, the differences in physical capabilities among athletes are negligible. The real difference is the Mental Edge..” (p.8)

When a tennis player is “on his game,” he’s not thinking about how, when, or even where to hit the ball. He’s not trying to hit the ball, and after the shot he doesn’t think about how badly or how well he made contact. The ball seems to be hit through an automatic process that doesn’t require thought. (Timothy Gallwey, Inner Game of Tennis, quoted p.46)

“… you need to practice the way you want to perform, because that’s the way you will perform.” (p.53)

1. Desire Statement

Great achievements don’t start with reality. They start with desire. (p.57)

Desires activate subconscious processes that begin to work automatically to improve sports performance. They create opportunities to take us beyond where we had been before. Obstacles don’t disappear, but they become negotiable hurdles that we are able to go over, through, and around. (p.59)

The mind tends to move toward our dominant thoughts, and if your Desire Statement is strong and compelling, you will activate the brain to move beyond conventional thinking, and trigger subtle physiological activity that can help turn a desire into a reality. (p.59)

Write a Desire Statement

The Desire Statement must be motivating for you.

Write the Desire Statement every morning and every night for the next ten days.

Read it each time with enthusiasm and belief.

As your performance changes, or circumstances change, you can adjust your Desire Statement accordingly.

The more detailed your Desire Statement, the more enticing it will become.

You need to write down the physical and mental training program you must adopt to make these two statements come true.

Be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time)

2. Visualisation

The imagination is more powerful than the will. (p.43)

“… your central nervous system does not differentiate between real and imagined events… In essence, sharp mental images, in which all of the senses are involved, are capable of ‘priming’ and ‘pretraining’ the body for a particular physical movement. This creates a pathway or connection between mind and body that promotes a smoother and more precise physical activity once you actually get to the playing field. Thus, when you make the transition from an imagined to a real athletic performance your body has already been through a dress rehearsal and has a blueprint of every movement it should make. Your body knows what to expect and how it is supposed to function because it has already done so in response to your imagery.”

During visualization you are essentially “priming” the muscles for the particular task ahead… You condition your brain, nervous system, and body to perform in the way you want it, thus increasing your chances of doing well in competition. It helps create self-confidence. And it puts your brain and body in a comfort zone that allows you to perform when the moment of competition finally arrives.

“Sometimes I’ll be running off pure instinct, following whatever my subconscious sees.” (Freeman McNeil, American Football player).

Although the word ‘visualisation’ suggests that sight is the only sense used in the process… the other senses – hearing, smell, touch, and taste – are just as important in this performance enhancing technique. (p.87)

Dissociated Visualisation and Associated Visualisation (where you are involved completely in the images).

Frankly, the biggest mistake that most people make who teach visualisation make is that they don’t encourage their student-athletes to move from the dissociated to the associated state…. As a result, many visualizers see their images as if they’re happening to someone else. (p.89).

Keep you imagery personal, positive, detailed, and in the present.

Experience all of the emotions and feeling that you possibly can.

Perform visualisation once in the morning and once at night.

Before a game or a competition, run through your visualisation exercise, reviewing what you want to accomplish.

3. Performance Cues

… a stimulus that elicits a predictable response.

You’ve probably heard of studies by Ivan Pavlov, the Russian psychophysiologist. His experiments with dogs demonstrated the conditioning process. He would ring a bell, show a hungry dog some meat, and, of course the animal would salivate. After repeating this process many times, Pavlov eliminated the middle step – that is, he rang the bell but didn’t show the meat to the dog. But because of the repeated pairing of the bell and the meat, the dog had become conditioned to salivate whenever he heard the bell. The bell became a cue or a sensory stimulus that the dog responded to in a consistent way. (p.105).

Cues give permanence to an experience. They create certain emotions and feelings within us, even though we’re not consciously trying to tap into them.

The cue must be something you can consistently call upon and duplicate in a moment.

This cueing technique allows you to stimulate and instantly relive your successes from the past.

Keep your cue words / actions simple.

Power Talk (p.112-116)

Breathing (121-126)

4. Posture

Your physical posture is not only one of the quickest ways to influence what your opponents thing about you, it can change how you feel about yourself as well. It sounds too simple to be true, but your own body posture is a direct link to the brain, and it communicates signals that affect and influence the mind. How you stand and how you present yourself can almost instantly transform your own self-confidence and alter the way others respond to you. (p.129)

The Mental Edge

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