As I start posting on a regular basis, I figured it would make sense to explain Aypex a bit more. Our immediate vision is to improve athlete performance and reduce injury risk by optimizing the mind-body connection. What does that mean?
I’m sure most everyone is familiar with Yogi Berra saying “Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.” or at least have heard something along those lines. The exact stats (and math) are up for debate, but the science absolutely points to mental aspects of the game being as important, if not more important, than the physical pieces. This idea doesn’t just apply to athletics, it applies to every facet of life.
That leads to our first pillar: How we think determines how we physically perform, and how we perform influences how we think.
Sounds a bit circular right? I would say so. Performance in sports requires a complex combination of the mind and body. Performance in day to day life requires the same combination. The interesting thing is that we have robust technologies to track every physical metric related to our health and sport yet how do we quantify the thought patterns that lead to our behaviors?
The issue I see with current approaches is the separation of mind and body. Wearables are great for recovery, exertion, and physical health metrics, yet they don’t give a comprehensive picture of how we’re doing. I might have a fantastic training session based on the data, but I was fighting demons trying to remain focused on the task at hand. While we wouldn’t know that in real-time, Aypex is able to add that extra layer of insight–our psychological patterns–to the physical data we already know and love.
Now here’s our second pillar: Optimal health is achieved by taking a unified approach; every piece affects the others. In addition to this, physical health and mental health are intertwined and should be treated as such (psychophysical health).
If you’re able to get a comprehensive view of both physical and psychological metrics, you’re in a much better position to improve and address challenges. This gives you the ability to address root causes and not just symptoms.
Here’s a personal example to better illustrate what I mean. As a Division I rower in college, I tore my ACL skiing (shouldn’t have taken the risk of skiing but that is a separate lesson). As I went through the recovery process, the physical data told me that I had a leg strength issue, so I worked on leg strength. The issue persisted despite me following all the right protocols with oversight from coaches and the athletic training department…so what was happening? Fortunately, this was my 3rd ACL tear, and I realized this was a psychological problem, not a strength issue. I had to regain trust in my body. I had to accept that I was strong enough and ignore the fear that if I used full strength I would injure myself again. Turns out it was a trust problem not a strength problem.
What Aypex does is allow users to better understand how their mind and body interacts. It would have saved me weeks or months of ACL recovery by highlighting the root cause of my issue and guiding me to the solution.
I used an injury example because it was convenient, but the same concepts apply to anyone. By seeing a more comprehensive picture of our health, we’re able to optimize more effectively, avoid challenges before they arise, and become better versions of ourselves.
Our third pillar: Concepts from athletics translate to all areas of life. Aypex is starting with performance optimization, but we’re really gearing up for overall health optimization.
As much as we’d all like our challenges to disappear, that’s not going to happen. I listen to the Ed Mylett Show on a regular basis, and he referred to this as “new levels, new devils.” When one challenge is overcome, another seems to appear, especially when we’re upgrading ourselves. This is a sign of growth, which is great, but what if we could solve the problem faster? What if we could cut the trial and error cycle in half or more? What if we knew exactly what we needed to do to overcome the challenge and when we needed to do it? How can we do this?
Aypex gains psychological insights through user conversations with the app– just write or speak what’s on your mind. From this data, we extract the info needed to form insights and guide the user forward. Physical data is pulled from APIs. The combination of the two leads to a massively valuable pool of information for you to pull from and use to improve. Aypex helps you understand what it all means and then gives you the right resources to capitalize on the opportunities.
This is probably a lot for a single post, but figured I’d get it out there. More to come.
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