Today’s podcast features Logan Christopher of Legendary Strength and Lost Empire Herbs.
Logan Christopher is a strongman, entrepreneur and mental training expert from Santa Cruz, CA. Logan is regarded as an expert in the mental performance field, and he has in depth expertise as an NLP Master Practitioner and certified hypnotist.
In the last 6 months, I’ve begun to understand that an area I wanted this podcast to reach that often remains untapped and unknown is in the sports (and human) psychology fields. We tend to turn the basic means of strength building over and over again in our heads without taking a deeper look at all the other influencers of a training program, namely the mental aspects. Since the nervous system drives all major athletic adaptation, and the mind is the seat of the nervous system, I’ve made a commitment to getting more sport psychology specialists on the show.
Like Logan says early on in this episode, we often credit winning and losing as being in the mind, but we rarely make any sort of coordinated effort to improve our mental abilities, leaving these words more hollow than anything. In this episode with Logan, we dig into the “big three” structured mental training concepts that can be useful in any athletic pursuit (and even outside athletics), which are visualization, hypnosis and anchors. Having a better understanding of these three mechanisms can give any coach or athlete more tools by which to improve their performance, and realize their fullest potential.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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Key Points:
- Logan’s background in the field
- Anecdotes on how effective mental training can be
- Why actual mental training isn’t popular, despite its effectiveness
- How to optimize visualization for strength, speed and power expression
- Why hypnosis for athleticism isn’t what comes to mind, and how effective it can be
- How to use mental anchors to enhance access to flow states in practice and competition
Quotes:
“When it comes to mental training, sometimes you have to go inside and face things you don’t want”
“When it comes to hypnosis, most people think of a stage hypnotist that makes people cluck like a chicken”
“Being up on a stage can accelerate your results or hinder them”
“There are three main tool sets in mental training, visualization, hypnosis and anchors”
“The state you need to do a deadlift is different than the state you need to swim 50 meters, or run 50 meters. There may be some similarities between these, but there are also key differences”
“If you can time the brightening of the image (in visualization) along with the lift, that works a little bit better”
“Brightening the image gives more neurological juice to it”
“Our subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between something that is vividly imagined and something that is real”
“For athleticism, if you can just get into alpha (brain wave) state, that’s more than enough”
“An anchor changes your state instantly (and can get you into flow state)”
About Logan Christopher
Logan Christopher is a strongman, entrepreneur and mental training expert from Santa Cruz, CA. He is the owner of legendarystrength.com and is the CEO of Lost Empire Herbs lostempireherbs.com.
Logan is regarded as an expert in the mental performance field, and he has in depth expertise as an NLP Master Practitioner and certified hypnotist. As a strongman, Logan has numerous feats to his name, such as phonebook tearing, nail bending, truck pulling and kettlebell juggling. This blend of interests and abilities gives Logan a unique perspective in the strength and human performance industry.
Keep reading: Mental Training, Hypnosis, and Strength Development: An Interview with Logan Christopher
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