Archive for August, 2008
August 18th, 2008
In the intense coverage on the training and personal lives of the Olympic athletes, one of the things you discover when you listen closely is how massage and recovery are just as important as the actual physical training regimes. It’s down to a science and is taken very seriously. Many athletes have personal massage therapists to make sure the tiniest of kinks are massaged out several times a day.
Without putting importance to this, they know there is no chance for Gold. Even the slightest tension will hinder peak performance physically and mentally. Milliseconds are what win Gold medals and attention to minute details such as every aspect of relaxation is also scrutinized very closely in Olympic training.
Some Olympians are lucky to have even two full-time therapists to make sure optimal muscular strength, body energy, and mental focus are flowing without hinderance.
Of course, most of us “civilians” are lucky to have a massage once a month if even that. Most spas and therapists charge an arm and a leg just for that one massage. To even consider hiring full-time massage therapists would break most people’s bank account. So if have neither the money or time to do this and we still want to achieve Gold in our daily lives, what do we do?
If you’re not lucky enough to be married to a massage therapist like I am, then it’s certainly much harder to get in the “Gold zone” like Olympic athletes and other top performers.
Think back to how fantastic you feel when you’ve had a massage and how every cell in your body feels ready to exude maximum execution of movement and concentration. I’m sure most of you have thought, “Wow, just think of what I could do if I had this every day!”
Other than the cost, I know many of you simply can’t afford the time with work, family, and workouts all demanding attention. But, recovery and relaxation are musts to think clearly and to make certain the body has recuperated from workouts before you pile on more pain and tension creating layers upon layers of damaged muscle tissue and injuries. Both the body and mind need recovery time - clearing time, rejuvenation time, breathing time.
A great massage can certainly speed up clearing your mind from senseless chatter and thoughts that contain little focus that play over and over creating undue tension. But something easy you can do to help clear your mind is to take frequent and scheduled breathing, meditation, or “intention breaks” and to make certain that the sounds that are coming into your brain aren’t accumulating debilitating tensions.
I’ve installed a program on my computer that plays incredible scenery and sounds of nature from all around the world - from underwater tropical reefs, to the snow blowing over the Alps, to crickets in grassy meadows with horses.
At work and the gym throughout the day, you can hardly go anywhere without hearing some kind of music, chatter, industrial sounds, and freeway noise. We tell ourselves we don’t hear it. But believe me, scientists will tell you that it’s influencing your psyche and body mechanics in ways we’d hardly think possible. Usually those sounds add to the tension instead of taking away.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, your mind adjusts to the tempo of your surroundings - hence the science of music manipulation that is crafted to influence the unconscious psyche. Scientists have found that classical music played in malls decreases violence and theft. Music with tempos at 60 beats per minute slow your heart rate down. The list goes on and on.
All kinds of music is crafted and logged into specific playlists to relax you and make you more likely to buy because of your relaxed mood in groceries stores and malls.
But, just as music influences, so can the screeching of tires, motor engines, and whirs of city traffic. Pointless chatter in the office can decrease your concentration on work just as easily. These outside “tension influencers” begin encouraging shallow tight breaths day in and day out and other tensions that affect our speech, our handwriting, our choice of words, to the quick tiring of muscular strength and speed.
We’re being influence whether we’re aware of it or not. So why not be in charge and start taking back your mental focus with quick breathing breaks - quick meditation breaks away from all the endless tensions that come through the tiny vibrations inside your inner ear?
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August 13th, 2008
I think most of you know the power of taking sun’s rays and adjusting its vast powers into a small point of a magnifying glass. Because of the concentration of power into one small point you get focused burning power that can easily start a fire.
Without the lens concentrated into a small beam of light and for a long enough time, the sun can shine as bright and hot as she wants - but never be quite intense enough to start flames here on earth without the right kind of focus.
We are very much like the sun in a sense. We can psyche ourselves up to be very hot and intense with burning desire and intention. But without all that energy focused with the right intensity over a long enough period in one pinpoint spot, a fire will never start - and our full muscular strength will never be realized.
Most fail to realize their full potential because they lack the ability to focus their power and concentrate that strength for a longer period than just a few seconds.
Without the knowledge of specifically where to focus your efforts and knowledge of where best to apply them specifically to create fluid athletic movements, then the keenest mental focus in the world isn’t going to create greater strength with burning power and speed.
It’s like a barrage of missiles that are off course and miss their mark. It still doesn’t matter how powerful any one of them are, their force won’t demonstrate their full effectiveness on the target unless they hit right on the money.
So it is with human intention and action, if you’re off the mark even with the greatest of mental focus and passion, you still end up not putting your greatest power where it should be.
In addition, no matter how good you get at focusing all your resources to hitting one target, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is that this practice doesn’t necessarily translate into where and how exactly to apply it to human movement which isn’t remotely like a stationary target. We’re always in constant motion and especially in sports it seems advantageous if our focus could to be in several areas almost at the same time to be most effective.
You will be amazed how fast you improve peak performance and enhance sports performance when you begin spending at least as much time training your brain with mental focus training as you do your body.
To Your Strength and Mastery,
Garin Bader
P.S. This is why I give you many physical and mental tools in CoreForce Energy to help empower your body and mind to work together to focus the right intensity where it counts the most in living fluid action.
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August 10th, 2008
Today I’d like to tell you about a technique I’ve used for many years that has allowed me to learn faster with greater mental focus and to integrate what I learn from one field into the other at a high rate of speed. And, of course, it has also helped me gain great strength quickly by applying this technique.
In my years in the Conservatory of Music, I think a lot of my colleagues thought I needed electroshock therapy because I’d utilized my time in our assigned practice rooms in a most peculiar manner.
Where most would be practicing their chosen instrument the entire time of several hours. I’d play the piano for 15-20 minutes and then do handstand pushups, then pick up a deck of cards, go back to the piano, then pick up my bokken(a wooden samurai practice sword) and slice through the air like one of the Seven Samurai, and then back to the piano.
I’d continually be changing things around, the time, and activities - every practice session throughout the day - never leaving time for the brain or body to get “settled in”.
Yes, I’m sure it was quite bazaar to a lot of people. But going from one discipline to another in succession is an incredible tool for quick learning in many respects.
It’s also one of the techniques that I firmly believe helped me in winning 13 international competitions in my career. My competition seemed to always be scrathing their heads in how I had so much energy and was quick to gain sharp mental focus no matter what the situation.
Well, duh, you exude what you practice.
One is that it instantly changes your mental focus which is a very good thing. In having to apply it instantly to different situations that don’t last long and repeated many times throughout the day, you have many times to learn to regain optimal mental focus quickly in different circumstanes. Most gain mental focus in one or two things - maybe - once a day.
By getting up from one thing and moving right to the next, you change your energy and are forced to change your mental focus in a new direction each time. Most of the time, that new change in energy and mental focus are the very things that gets you past the stumbling blocks that were hindering the former.
When you hit each project for short periods with both varied mental focuses and vast changes in energies, you begin seeing the crossovers of applications to each discipline. Thus, you learn faster, gain greater speed, increase strength, power, mental focus and awareness - quicker.
Try hitting your handstand pushups several times a day during a quick break at work. Really how long do 3-5 take to do? Try doing wall isomentrics the breathing deeply for 30 seconds while waiting for an elevator. The list is endless. But watch how quickly your strength and your mental focus begin improving tremendously fast by changing things around on a daily basis. Notice how that rush of blood to your head, your lungs, and muscles many times a day changes both your energy and mental focus for the very next activity you do afterwards.
Sure, you might get some stares and family members and coworkers quickly looking for the right sized straight jacket for you. But from what you learn from this, they’ll never be fast enough to catch you. 
To Your Strength and Mastery,
Garin Bader
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August 8th, 2008
‘I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do
everything
I will not refuse to do the
something that I can do.’
- Edward Everett Hale
I try to use every opportunity to program my mind for super strength and success. It’s in the everyday things we do and in each second that passes by that great moments and ideas are born and are the very things that can make all the difference in fast-forwarding ourselves towards the goals in our lives that really matter.
Too many people think they need to allot a bunch of time to think about success and their goals. They feel a need to find a quiet place, the right time, the right mood - and it usually never comes.
By the time they think about scheduling the “right time”, they’ve already passed hundreds of opportunities to program their minds for victory in so many things - the very things that matter to them the most if they could become a reality.
We say so often that the time just flew by and then turn right around and say that time stands still. So which is it?
Time’s second hand is always ticking the same relentless beat. It’s our minds that interpret it as being fast or slow.
Regardless of whether it’s fast or slow, take each second that seems idle to program your mind for success instead of with stupid mind chatter that disempowers us.
For instance, upload several awesomely inspiring photos into your phone for a screensaver. Every time you answer your phone the screensaver will light up and you’ll see a picture that inspires you towards a goal, a peak performance moment, a victory snapshot.
Upload several photos that REALLY inspire you deeply and represent things that make you move towards just by the image they represent - pictures that inspire action and ideas. If you have the skills, put text on a photo with an editing application that states your victory in capitals. Sure, you might not have a large screen, but a postage stamp often gets a powerful message across even with its size - and most phones are quite a bit bigger, right?
Every time you answer the phone, you’d want your voice to exhibit optimal strength and confidence anyway, right? We’ll here’s a flickering moment of opportunity to program your mind towards success that doesn’t take a lot of time and is super powerful. Instead of faking it without a truly empowering picture in your mind, you might as well feel it and see something that affects you deeply and that’s genuine, right?
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