EVERYTHING YOU VISUALIZE MATTERS!
Let me explain.
Every single thought we allow into our minds while we are training, relaxing, or in a real-world scenario matters. Whether you want a thought there or not, as soon as it arises, you have an opportunity to guide and correct it positively to impact your training…
You could find a “bad” thought float into your mind about how you handle a situation, and then quickly find yourself imaging the worst outcome and you taking little to no action. STOP DOING THAT!! Every time a thought like that enters, you must push yourself to guide your visualization and images to reflect winning and victorious outcomes. It’s not bad to see yourself in a bad position, but as soon as you do, give yourself permission in your thoughts to CRUSH your way through it.
Fight with everything you can!
Guide thoughts as they enter your mind.
With each movement we perform—consider the example of a striking combination in the gym or while shadowboxing—it is not just the motor skills of a jab and a flank that count. While focusing on the finer points of motor execution is a necessary first step for beginners, as you progress to an elite level of performance and strive for mastery, those motor skills MUST be connected with real-world context and objectives in order to ensure that you can access them in a life-or-death scenario and achieve your desired outcomes.
It all comes down to guiding your thoughts each time they enter your mind. Imagine yourself at the gym doing bench presses. Suddenly, a thought pops into your head that pushing the bar off your chest is like pushing an attacker off of you. Go with it! Visualize how you are able to press them off you and shift your hips to shrimp out, exploding to your feet so you can access your BLADE. Choose each action you take as it relates to the scenario, and you get the idea. Visualization can happen anytime and anywhere. You can get great reps while sitting down and drinking your morning tea.
Take advantage of them!!
Connect the scenario to your senses.
To FORGE yourself as an ASSET, you may physically be standing in the gym or in your living room shadowboxing, but in your mind, you must be completely immersed in a full scenario. What environment are you VISUALIZING yourself in? What or who are you preparing to strike? What static elements are present in that environment, and what dynamic elements do you need to consider—is there a wall? A vehicle? Are there other people with you? Are they children—liabilities—or other adults you would classify as independents or assets? (To learn more about these distinctions, take the SADA training module here) Who or what in that environment most requires your protection? And how can you most advantageously position yourself to provide that defense for them?
Smell it. Feel it. See it. Talk to the bad guy if that’s part of the scenario that you’re envisioning—you’ll see me do that all the time in my training reps where I’m training de-escalation from a non-confrontational posture before striking. Then tailor your training reps strategically to prepare you for success in the scenario you’ve created: if my family is to my right, I train a jab and a flank offline to the right where I can access my weapons, the threat’s weapons are offline, and I’m positioned advantageously between the threat and the ones I am shielding. (You can view me training this scenario in the CRUSH EVERYTHING YOUTUBE video, “Visualization is Critical”—click here)
This is the key to how elite warriors train for no-fail missions – and it works for everyone.
What I am sharing with you is one of the most impactful strategies in the warrior’s training toolkit: connecting VISUALIZATION with MOVEMENT. It is powerful. It is backed by everything science knows about how our brains learn, and endorsed by TIER-1 OPERATORS with real-world combat experience. Every rep matters; every movement matters. Your brain is learning from every single move you make, so don’t allow any bad reps. As Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Our mission at CRUSH EVERYTHING has been, since day one, to FORGE, TRAIN, AND EQUIP ASSETS. Training yourself to become a true ASSET, however, expands far beyond the weight you put up, the shots you can make in a static environment, or the moves you can perform on the mats. An ASSET isn’t just a master of flawless execution; they are also a master of scenario and context. To become truly elite in an operational sense, you must be able to connect your violently executed strategy with the right scenario, in full consideration of your desired outcomes—something which can only be achieved through the deliberate pairing of VISUALIZATION and MOVEMENT in each training repetition you perform.
When you harness the impact of VISUALIZATION, every rep takes on immense power, and this is the key to FORGING ASSETS!
-DOM