Olympic athletes like freestyle skier Eileen Gu use visualization to compete at their very best. But visualization isn’t just for Olympians. It works for anyone at any level and for any competition. Whether you are wanting to compete as an amateur, or whether you are simply competing against yourself to get fit and healthy, visualization is valuable. Why? In three words: Because it works. It helps you to get inspired and motivated. It helps you train more efficiently and effectively. It helps you prepare for big challenges. Visualization will uplevel your game, no matter what your game is.

Geoffrey Colvin, author of Talent is Overrated, points out that what makes the most successful people in the world, whether they are athletes, scientists or musicians is not innate talent or genius. Instead he proposes that much of the difference in outstandingly successful individuals is how they train. They figure out what needs to change in how they train to make up for their weaknesses. So it is not just that they train hard. It is that they train smart. And if you are interested in training smarter, then consider visualization. It is used by successful professionals in every field. It helped power Bianca Enescu to winning the U.S. Open. It helped Eileen Gu win Olympic Gold. And it can help you to train better and smarter.

Want to get fit faster? Visualization can help. This is not magic, it’s science. It’s how the brain works. Strange as it may seem, the brain and the subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between something we visualize and something that is real.  So if we imagine lifting weights, the brain reacts as if you had just done it, and over time it creates stronger muscles. Or say you imagine shooting free throws. Over time you actually get better, as if you had practiced doing this in real life. All of this points to the fact that we can get fitter faster if we combine our workouts with the power of visualization.

One of the biggest problems with any fitness routine is that there are days when we simply don’t want to work out. It doesn’t matter how much we paid a trainer to create the perfect workout for us. It doesn’t matter how often we feel better after working out. It doesn’t matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we SHOULD workout. We are simply unmotivated. This is where the power of effective visualization comes in. Through it, we learn to shift our mindset and attitude, our emotional and mental state. We connect to our vision and we get inspired. We go beyond the momentary resistance and come back to our day with inspiration and drive. In that way we overcome the biggest obstacle to reaching our fitness goals — all through knowing how to visualize.

Maybe you want your cholesterol to be lower. Maybe you want to lose 10 pounds. Maybe you want to have more endurance when you jog. Whatever your health or fitness goals may be, they will be aided by having a vision of your optimal health. Why? Because when we visualize in an effective manner, it programs the subconscious mind to recognize and move in that direction. It “remembers” the feeling of that state we visualized. And it automatically aids us in taking steps towards it. So what is your picture of health?

Do you want to get fit faster? Do you want your brain to train your muscles while you are sitting calmly in a chair? Do you want an advantage to becoming fit that others will find unreal or even unfair? Visualization can be that advantage. Visualization has been scientifically proven to increase athletic performance, increase muscle strength and to be an effective motivator in cultivating endurance. And it is well worth the time invested. So much so that many studies have shown spending time visualizing is more effective than spending that time adding to your workout. Get the advantage, whether others think it is fair or not.

Visualization is not daydreaming or wishful thinking. When done properly it can produce amazing results. One of the most astonishing research studies on visualization has to do with growing muscle.  This study of building muscle mass contained two groups.  One group participated in actual physical exercise and saw a 30% increase in muscle during the study. The second group visualized performing exercises in their minds only and showed a 13.5% increase in muscle mass. Not only that, this increase persisted even three months after the visualization training. This is concrete scientific evidence of the power of visualization.

Visualization can grow muscle — even without exercise. If that is the case, imagine what it can do when used with exercise.

Using visualization to obtain a health;y weight is not about wishful thinking. It is not just about picturing yourself at your ideal weight. It is about addressing what stands in the way of attaining healthy weight. It is about addressing the things that distract us, the limiting beliefs that get in the way and the wavering self confidence that our prior attempts at healthy weight have created. When you visualize with EnVision you have a chance to change your relationship to all of these. You uplevel your motivation, improve your self confidence and work with the subconscious mind to create new habits. With that, you reach your healthy weight, sooner, easier and better.

Every workout, every training session, every time we go to the gym, the track, or the yoga mat is an opportunity to perform at our best. The better we perform, the better the training and the faster we reach our goals. What do the experts, those at the top of their field, do in order to train and perform at their best. The best Olympians use visualization. They spend time visualizing their performances, their workouts and the improvements they are training for. They use the science of visualization to prepare. And you can too. You can have the advantage visualization offers and train like an Olympian. We have made it easy for you to do in one widely-used app.

Working out can be a pain, literally. Sometimes we reach our max and it becomes hard to keep going, to keep training and not give up. We don’t want to push and injure ourselves, but we do want to stretch ourselves past the easy and comfortable. And visualization can help. When we use visualization to shift our state ahead of time into one of excitement and inspiration that can allow us to have the energy and the fortitude to go further, faster and harder than we have ever gone before. Visualization is a powerful tool for shifting our mindset and attitude or what we call “state.” And when we are in that inspired state, we can gut it out, without the pain. That’s one way visualization can help us become fitter and healthier than we have ever been before. 

If we want to make working out a habit, we have to be able to get ourselves motivated each day to do it. If we aren’t motivated, then an internal battle ensues, and we can get into all kinds of negative self talk and self doubt. So the need for an effective tool to shift our mindset and attitude becomes clear. Visualization is that tool. Its use goes way beyond just picturing what we want. It allows us to tap into the inspiration, drive and excitement we feel in our vision or goals. And that paves the way for us to shift our motivation and get in the mindset to work out. In that way, it becomes an invaluable aid to health and fitness.

Jon Gabriel was over 400 pounds. He had tried every diet out there. He knew he was on track to have a heart attack or other illness as he had seen it happen in others. And still he could not lose weight. What his conscious mind wanted and what his subconscious wanted were two very different things. Until he realized that his body was running subconscious programming that was undermining him, he got nowhere. Once he realized it, he researched and developed a system for weight loss. And one of the key components of that system is visualization. Visualization is a way of communicating with the subconscious mind and getting your conscious and subconscious to align with one another. Now at a healthy 184 pounds, he can attest to the power of visualization.

Yogi Berra was a baseball player, manager and coach who was famous for his wise and humorous statements. When it came to training, he famously said, “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.” As a professional athlete, he was acutely aware of how powerful the mind is. Visualization is one of the tools that can make your mind powerful in training. It is not simply that you will be able to train better and perform better. You will be able to leverage that “ninety percent” of the game and show up with greater motivation, more endurance and improved training technique. Get that ninety percent nailed down with visualization.

What is the best way to get psyched up for your workout? Just talking to yourself can lead to arguing with yourself. A better way is needed. This is where visualization comes in. One of the strengths of visualization is its ability to affect mindset, attitude and emotions. Why? Because the brain is wired to respond to what we visualize as if it were real. Getting psyched up to workout becomes easy with visualization. And when we do this regularly, it becomes easier and easier to do. Take the plunge, visualize, get psyched up and go work out.

Better health is often not simple and easy. It often requires major changes in our lifestyle and major effort to establish new habits and routines. In these efforts, we need effective tools that can help us achieve our goals more easily. Visualization is one such tool. When done in an effective manner, visualization can help us be more motivated. It can help us rehearse how to handle when we fall off the wagon, so we can get back on track faster. And it helps us to rewire our subconscious, so that we naturally gravitate toward more healthful behaviors. Health is vitally important and visualization can help us to see, feel it and become it.