Online Mental Trainer is here!

I am just going to take a few minutes here and write about how excited we are to launch Online Mental Trainer (OMT), why we are doing this and what it is. If you want to save yourself some time and skip this entire post you can go now to www.onlinementaltrainer.com to learn more about it. However, if you keep reading, you will be able to understand why OMT is different from traditional sport psychology and how it can help athletes achieve peak performance more often, and yes, I will also share more about how we got here and how thrilled we are to launch Online Mental Trainer.

For a long time (more than 15 years I think) we have observed how athletes work on their fitness and athletic skills to improve performance, while missing a critical piece to achieve high-performance; mental training. It is the mind that separates the competition, and because of that we embarked in this great journey of helping athletes of all levels work on controlling their emotions and becoming mentally tough to overcome issues like slumps, burnout, performance anxiety, nervousness, anger, and choking, that drive under-performance.

Now, fast forwarding to mid 2009, we said to ourselves; not everyone can afford to work with a Mental Trainer one-on-one so how can we share our expertise and experience with more athletes, and even more effectively? The answer was fairly straight forward, but not a simple one. We needed to create a system that is affordable and offers high quality information, in a clear, understandable and customized format. So, we set a goal for ourselves to make online mental training available by 2010.

That was the first step, now how do we do it?

We had all the content, the resources, the processes, the experience and the desire to make it happen, so we went out and started to assemble a team to help us. We enlisted marketers, mental trainers, coaches, athletes, sport psychologists, web designers and most importantly web developers to take this great business we had built offline and make it available online. We pulled long hours, days and weekends, we had tons of brainstorming meetings and discussions (some of them not as fun or easy as you may think) and wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code, to finally have a beta version available in late December 2009. I want to thank the hundreds of people who were part for the beta testing period and helped us get OMT to market today.

We are excited about launching Online Mental Trainer and want to take this opportunity to thank all those who have helped us get here. This is only the first step, but an important one, towards building what will help us achieve our vision of taking mental training to the masses by making it available and affordable.

So, what exactly is Online Mental Trainer?

Let me start by describing the difference between sports psychology and mental training. Sports psychology is a broad term used to define the division of psychology related to sports performance; on the other hand, mental training is the use of sound cognitive-based systems to build emotion control, confidence and self-sufficiency. It often includes goal setting, visualization, mental imagery, self-talk retraining, emotion control and in general, ways to establish true ideal thoughts, images and emotions to enhance performance.

Now, Online Mental Trainer is a web-based tool that generates a custom mental training program so athletes can improve their performance. It is different from other mental training programs because it is affordable and gives access to the same information used by pro and Olympic athletes who use these mental skills to improve their performance. It provides videos and materials created by some of the best Mental Trainers® in the world who actually teach the skills.

There is so much more I could say about mental training and OMT, but I don’t want to go on forever on this post. Make sure to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube to learn more about mental training and OMT. We are also kicking off our email series called “Take Control” where we will share more actionable information about mental training that you can leverage on your daily and weekly training. You can register here to receive these emails.