Athletes: To get more playing time, you need to go beyond the standard training techniques that everyone else uses. Your eyes and your brain are the keys to unlock all of your sports performance skills. It's time to focus on the cognitive side of your game.
Parents: You've spent thousands to get your developing athlete on the right team with the right coach. Now, invest in the most important components of skill acquisition; visual perception, pattern recognition and decision-making.
Coaches: Mental mistakes, missed assignments and slow decisions are holding your team back. While you teach them the tactics of the game, they may benefit from supplemental training for their vision and cognitive skills. Think of it like strength and conditioning for the brain.
At 80 Percent Mental, we help teams develop their Athlete Cognition® so they can get more playing time and give them an edge over their competition.
Our new book is available on June 12 from Jeter Publishing/Simon & Schuster!
The Playmaker's Advantage - How To Raise Your Mental Game To The Next Level
by Leonard Zaichkowsky and Daniel Peterson
Coaches search for it. Parents dream of it. Fans love it. Athletes want it.
The Playmaker on any sports team possesses it: an elusive, intangible quality combining anticipation, perception, and decision-making skills. This quality raises their game above the competition and allows them to pass when no one else can, anticipate the movement of opponents, and avoid costly mental mistakes, thus holding the team together.
Using today’s technology and tools, it is now possible to understand, assess, and train this sixth sense rather than just hope it magically appears. Now, for the first time, cognitive science research is revealing the secrets of the Playmaker’s keen sense of awareness. Just as tests of speed, strength, and agility have provided a baseline of physiological biomarkers, coaches can now capture cognitive metrics including attention, pattern recognition, anticipation, and the ability to take quick, decisive action during the chaos of competition.
"The Playmaker’s Advantage is a groundbreaking book that will educate athletes, coaches and parents about this essential creative capability in an accessible, easy to understand way."
Order the Hardcover, E-Book or Audio version today:
The Athlete Cognition Cycle®
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Advanced Vision Assessment and Training
When playing sports, an athlete's eyes take in over 80% of the available sensory information as compared to your other four senses. Over 30% of the neurons in the brain are devoted to processing visual input.
So, it makes perfect sense to assess your team's visual perception to test their ability to see patterns developing and react quicker to moving objects that give them that extra tenth of a second to make the right decision.
Decide
Cognitive Skills Assessment and Training
You know your team's 40-yd dash times, resting heart rates and maybe even their VO2 max scores. But do you know the reaction time, pattern recognition ability or working memory capacity of each player?
These are just a few of the brain skills they use hundreds of times in every game. They can also cause mental mistakes, turnovers and poor decisions.
The good news is that these core cognitive abilities can be assessed and benchmarked to better understand each player's mental toolkit.
Execute
Skill Acquisition and Effectiveness Assessment
Seeing the available options and picking the right action mean nothing if you can't execute the skill, whether it be a movement, pass or shot.
Each athlete learns specific motor skills at different speeds and levels. Understanding the individual needs of each player through skills assessments speeds the learning process.
But the proof of effective training is in the evaluation of their competitive performance through decision-making analytics from game film review that measure the entire Athlete Cognition cycle.
