Bill Bodri
Sport visualization skills, the ability to create mental images of a perfected athletic performance in your mind, are extremely powerful tools for helping individuals achieve their athletic best. Legendary sports figures like Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Michael Jordan, Jerry West, Michael Phelps, Muhammad Ali, Pele, Ronaldinho and countless Olympic champions have all used mental imagery practice to improve their game because it indeed creates an advantage that adds an edge. If they did not think it worked then most elite athletes would not use it.Using mental visualization as a training technique invariably results in much better athletic performances so elite athletes everywhere are now using it. Seasoned athletes train to form highly detailed mental images and run-throughs of their entire athletic performance while vividly engaging all their senses in their mental rehearsal. The very best learn how to combine their knowledge of the sports venue, including their athletic skills and game strategies, with their mental rehearsals for excellence.Science has discovered that intently visualizing mental images of sports activities and actually doing them activates similar neural circuit regions of the brain. Because the brain doesn’t distinguish between doing something and just thinking about doing it, mentally rehearsing an athletic skill can then activate preexisting neural pathways just as well as physical practice does. Refreshing that mental imagery over and over again is then like carving a groove into your nervous system, enabling your actions to become more automatic which is a boon if you are imagining great skillfulness. Done consistently, visualizing ideal, perfect athletic actions in vivid detail can definitely help you reliably “hard-wire” a great performance in your brain. Imagining yourself doing those movements in a perfect fashion will help you become better at their execution.Athletes practice visualization because they want to condition their mind in such a way that the body automatically behaves the way they want it to without effort, which can take their performance to the next level of excellence. You can positively, absolutely improve your athletic performance when you start to employ the right type of mental imagery practice. Among other things, athletes commonly use visualization efforts to improve specific skills such as hitting or catching a ball, skiing a hill, swimming a race, jumping an obstacle, timing a response, or moving their body in a certain way particular to a sport. Mental imagery practice can also be used to enhance your confidence, boost motivation and reduce performance anxiety.Visualization practice helps prepare athletes for real competition. It can and should be a type of active mental rehearsal of how you want things to be in terms of your performance. By regularly creating certain experiences or scenarios in your mind, which your brain interprets as a real situation, you can skillfully prepare yourself with the appropriate expert response when it comes time to make those experiences happen. The magic is that sports visualization practice can then take you to the next level of competition because forming mental images in your mind will help construct mental and physiological schema that can be reproduced, almost automatically, in actual life.
