If you are looking to achieve mental sports excellence, Gary Mack and David Casstevens’ Mind Gym is obligatory reading. It contains practical lessons for improving your mental strength, avoiding distractions, triumphing over adversity, and pushing your mind’s limits.
Athletes and sports enthusiasts go to the gym to tone their bodies and get them in optimum shape, but they often forget the importance of building mental muscle. Mind Gym’s authors know this and have decided to address this issue.

What is this about?

Sports psychology consultant Gary Mack and writer, and Charles Barkley’s biographer, David Casstevens, have created a book in which they give you all you need to know if you want to unlock your mind’s potential and build some mental muscle to get an edge over other athletes and improve yourself.
Mind Gym starts with what has been proven by hundreds of studies – mental training improves productivity and enhances performance. However, unlike other self-improvement books, Mind Gym goes the extra mile and gives you practical lessons with which you can organize your very own mental training program.
The book contains forty easily accessible mental lessons that you can use to improve and challenge yourself. These mental lessons and ideas will help you deal with stress, build up your confidence, and push your mental and physical limits.
In other words, the book shows you how to deal with activities that have previously scared you by turning them into goals that you will try to achieve. As a result, the activities that were a problem for you in the past will now become challenges you will want to conquer. They will likely become your favourite parts of the sport you are partaking in too.

Spice it all up with humour

Mind Gym doesn’t only contain mental lessons, though. It also has anecdotes and stories about successful athletes and how they used their mental strength to get to where they are.
These stories are fun to read, but more importantly, they will help you realize how you can start thinking like these famous and successful sportspeople. They give you unique insight into how professional athletes think and what they do to build mental muscle. And if the mental activities and exercises they do, help them, they will likely benefit you too.
Another thing that Mind Gym is great for is teaching you how to stay motivated when the going gets tough. The book tells you how to push through during difficult periods and how to find that extra inspiration and motivation to make it to the end.
Gary Mack and David Casstevens know that distractions can be fatal when trying to follow your ambitions. To help you deal with this, they give you practical advice and exercises you can use to stay focused at all times and keep your eye on the ball.

The Verdict

To sum up, as Gary Mack often says in Mind Gym, “achieving inner excellence is a process,” and “building mental muscle” is similar to building “physical muscle.” In other words, the more you train your mind and the more you “work on the inside,” the more “it will show on the outside.”
And that’s exactly how you should look at this book if you want to get the most of it. Mind Gym truly is a gym for your mind, a place you go to when you want to tone your mind and achieve the mental strength needed to make your sports and life goals a reality.
If you read and use at least some of the forty mental lessons Gary Mack and David Casstevens list in the book, you will get the mental skills needed to go to the next level. Don’t leave anything to chance when it comes to achieving your goals. Read Mind Gym and create that perfect mental state to help you make the most of your potential.