Gord Hotchkiss writes some pretty compelling posts, and lately, I've been reading them all … including the latest on The Whys of Buy: Visualizing the Buy where Gord relates a story that originally appeared in About.com Sports Medicine category on Visualization and Muscle Strength

"…Now research is suggesting that visualization can actually strengthen muscles. Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio investigated the strength benefits of imagining exercising a muscle. They reported that just thinking about exercise helped maintain muscle strength in a group of subjects.

They split 30 healthy young adults into 3 groups. For 15 minutes a day, five days a week for 12 week, Group #1 imagined exercising their little finger muscle. Group #2 imagined exercising their biceps muscle and Group #3 acted as a control group and did no imaginary exercise. Those in the first two groups were asked to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as possible. The researchers measured muscle strength before, during and after the training sessions.

Group #1 (the finger exercisers) increased their strength 53 percent, wand Group #2 (the biceps group) increased strength by 13.4 percent. "

Hmm… I have to try that!  Darn, maybe I can get my pinky to get stronger - or something else to get better…or whatever.  But wait - it does get better:

"…If your purchase process requires a commitment on the part of the buyer, let them visualize the path required to get to the end. Use your website to build the path required to navigate through things like financing, negotiation, customer service, delivery and selection of products and options. Don’t just stop at visualization of ownership. Think about the visualization of the act of buying as well."

This referred to the idea that we can write compelling copy - but unless we can close the loop, unless we can convey to people what it's like to purchase the product, use the service, unless we can give people all the information they need to complete the purchase - even if everything else is good…if we've forgotten to enable visualization of "buying" or "owning", then we've left a lot of money, a lot of opportunity on the table.

Again, I've been reading Gord's posts because he has really good content plus he writes well…and hell….I've been in Times Square on a summer night - I live in NYC (and it would smell kinda bad at 98 degrees on a Saturday night).