Muscle Up Your Mind

I have always been good at working with my hands. For as long as I can remember, if something needed doing, I could generally figure it out. Physical work just came naturally. Now that I am getting a little bit older, just a little mind you, my body doesn't cooperate like it used too. My joints hurt, my back creaks, I sound like a bag of pop rocks when I get off the couch. All this noise brings me to my subject. For those of us who have depended on our muscles, when our body starts to wear out, we need to start using that oft neglected part of our body, the brain.

Some people figure out early in life that the brain is quite useful and amazing. For some of us, this realization takes a bit longer. For the last few years, I have been trying to exercise my brain muscle a bit more and I have discovered a couple of things. First, when the brain muscle has atrophied, it takes a while to get it back in shape. I have first hand knowledge in this area. Second, our brain doesn't know the difference between what is imagined and what is real.

I want to talk about this second discovery. Now, I'm quite sure that someone much smarter than I am discovered this long ago, but for me personally,it was a great discovery. It took reading a few books on the subject and looking back on my life for some personal confirmation that what I could believe, I could achieve.

Australian psychologist Alan Richardson did a study in which he took thirty people, had them all shoot free throws and recorded the amount of free throws they made. The people were then divided into three groups. The first group was instructed to practice shooting free throws every day for a month. The second group was instructed to visualize shooting perfect free throws every day for a month and the third group did nothing. The results of the study showed this; The first group improved 24% in that month. The second group improved 23% without ever touching a basketball. The third group was, of course, unchanged.

How is it that the second group and the first were virtually the same in their improvement when group two didn't even touch a ball? The brains of group two had shot just as many free throws as group one. Their brains had taught their muscles what they needed to do to improve. This floored me when I read it. To a hands on guy, this didn't make much sense.

In the Bible it says that "as a man thinketh, so is he". There is a book with that title that is a good read on the subject as well. What we visualize in our mind is what we will get. I'm not talking about wishful thinking. Visualization is an action word, it takes work to visualize what we want. We have to picture our goal in our mind, make it real so to speak. We have to visualize the actions needed to make this thought a reality, just like the free throw shooters had to see themselves making the shot over and over again. I am convinced that our brain is the most powerful tool we have if we will put it to work. Let's dust ourselves off and start exercising that most important muscle, the results will be astounding.