The Mental Edge: Maximize Your Sports Potential with the Mind-Body Connection

I bought this book for my 13 year old son while he was in the middle of his season. He was in a batting slump and each time up to bat I could tell he was very nervous and had a hard time making contact with the ball. He has always been a good ball player but this season his confidence was shot. After he read the book and did the excercises (before each game) his batting was back to normal. He ended the season with a .455 batting average and had the most RBI's on his team. I even had parents ask me what happened because he looked so much more confident. This is not magic and will only work if you are committed to your sport and are serious about improving. After reading this book you will understand that mental training is just as important as physical training.

I followed the suggestions of the reviewers here. While some seemed over-enthusiastic, I now understand why. This book IS that good.I would recommend it to anyone. It gets you to where you want and it doesn't talk over your head.

The Mental Edge is the mind body connection! I am a girls' high school volleyball coach in CA and the team uses Mr. Baums techniques religously. These techniques never allow the mind to get in the way of the body. The athlete learns to bombard his/herself with positive thoughts of previous success! The book is a must for any serious athlete. I have had the pleasure to work personally with Mr. Kenneth Baum and I am a better person, coach, and athlete because of our association! Results come quickly!

I am a magazine journalist and athlete, and write primarily about health and fitness--to the tune of about 40 articles a year. When I found this book I immediately decided to pitch a feature story on these techniques because they are DIFFERENT. There is so much out there on mental training that basically says, "Strive for excellence." Yawn! HOW? This book shows how. It covers a couple of basic concepts, visualization and positive self-talk, but delves into other techniques even I had not heard of. And I've interviewed many other trainers, coaches, etc. like Ken Baum. I think that's why such a top athlete like Karch Kiraly subscribed to these methods. The author's ideas called "Success History Search" and "Performance Cues" have been extremely helpful to me in the gym. When you write about fitness and work out all the time, it can get boring--but these ideas helped me break a plateau and move to an even better level of fitness.

This is really a very book that overcomes an all too common presentation flaw:Why is it good: The Mental Edge provides the clearest and most comprehensive program for developing metal training routines that can/will improve performance. And if you are good at some endeavor - you have already learned the base skills needed -- from there on it is mental. Again, of all the books (too many) on trying to understand and develop procedures .. this is the bestThe all too common flaw: The constant digressions regarding annecdotes and exhortations of "you can if you only believe." The content is great but in many cases the presentation would embarrass Shirly McLain.Nonetheless, I would encourage anyone with a sports objective to read (grit their way through). The specific recomendations are again the best compilation and application of mental training I know of