Research

We included this section to give some scientific insights into the latest mental performance techniques research. As a group that focuses on sports excellence, we are always looking at new ways to provide our clients with short-term and long-term benefits.

Some of the articles and resources are technically heavy but give a good view of the impact these techniques provide.

 

 

Meditation for Enhancing Attention and Focus

 

This research article discusses how 5-days of meditation training can increase a person’s attention, focus and enhance areas such as positive moods and reduce negative ones. Conducted by one of the leaders in meditation studies, Yi-Yuan Tang, the findings also provide an explanation of why mental training can have such a quick impact.

 

For athletes, this research holds great value. What if an athlete could put in place a foundation that starts to improves their attention, state-of-mind and energy levels in five days?

 

PDF:  Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation

 

Yi-Yuan Tang, Yinghua Ma, Junhong Wang, Yaxin Fan, Shigang Feng, Qilin Lu, Qingbao Yu, Danni Sui, Mary K. Rothbart, Ming Fan, and Michael I. Posner

Meditation for Improving Field or Court Vision

The follow article explains how people have given amounts of resources to recognize environments and moving objects, and that by practicing mental training people can enhance how quickly they recognize these. The researchers used moving dots to track people abilities.

 

Source:   Impact of intensive mental training

 

Antoine Lutz, Heleen A. Slagter, Lawrence L. Geischar, Sander Nieuwenhuis and Richard J. Davidson

Meditation can Increase the Gray Matter Density of the Brain

We found this article very interesting when we came across it. In addition to the different benefits of meditation, it has been discovered that through continuous training that meditation actually helps change the physical structure of the brain and increase its gray matter density.

 

This paper focuses mainly on the brain stem but references other areas of the brain that also have been shown to have increases in gray matter density by practicing meditation.

 

 PDF:   Long-term meditation is associated with increased gray matter density in the brain stem

Peter Vestergaard-Poulsen, Martijn van Beek, Joshua Skewes, Carsten R. Bjarkam, Michael Stubberup, Jes Bertelsen and Andreas Roepstorff

 

 

Visualization for Increasing Athletic Ability and Strength

 

Over the past five years a larger amount of research has been done in the area of visualization. Two research studies that we found engaging is one that focused on increasing basketball abilities and another that tracked how people increased their strength through visualization.

 

In the first study, Dr. Blaslotto of the University of Chicago found that people could increase their free throw percentage by 24% by using only visualization techniques. In the second study by The Cleveland Clinic, they found that people could increase regions of their physical strength by implementing a visualization training program.

Related story:  Visualization and Sports

 

Source: From mental power to muscle power

Ranganathan VK, Siemionow V, Liu JZ, Sahgal V, Yue GH.