Athletes all over the world use Mental Imagery when preparing for competition. It is also used by business-people preparing for an important meeting or presentation, students getting ready to give a speech in class, or even when “rehearsing” to ask that someone special for a first date! You could even call it fantasizing, however, the difference is you work to control the “fantasy” and dictate the outcome.

Imagination is the driving force of imagery. By training purely within your mind, you can create new neural pathways, modifying or strengthening processes between thought and muscle co-ordination. A neural pathway lies in or out of the brain, in the nerves, body and spine. They exist for every movement we make—itching your nose takes a neural pathway to complete! They are easy to create and can be reinforced with practice. Just like learning to swing a bat or golf club takes practice to get the coordination, so does Mental Imagery.

Mental Imagery is effective based on proof that you can exercise these parts of your brain with inputs from your imagination rather that from your senses: so, you “train your brain” to do things before you actually try to do them. Or if you are injured, you can use Mental Imagery to keep your feel of your sport and keep your brain engaged while your body rehabs.

I like to use "spurts" of Mental Imagery. I teach athletes to create 3-5 images to rehearse and practice, that way they have several to rotate through, focusing on the one (s) that are most needed. They are typically 15-30 seconds long, and will practice the image as many times a day as they can. For example, a gymnast can take the most difficult skill of a routine and mentally rehearse using Mental Imagery that skill to solidify it physically, as well as create self-confidence. The great thing about using these spurts of images is that you can do them anywhere and don’t need a quiet, dark room. Practice in the shower, or in the car (not while driving!), or instead of day-dreaming in class (not that I’m telling you not to pay attention…), focus on increasing your skills level for 15 seconds. If you have difficulty making the image positive, try slow-motion images until you can speed it up to real time. If you just can’t get it to be positive, try a different one and come back to the tough one later.

The KEY to really effective Mental Imagery is feeling. When you create your image, make sure to pair a feeling with the visual image. And most importantly, make that feeling positive! You want to feel strong, powerful, competitive, confident, happy, excited…you get the idea. To go back to our gymnast, if the skill is challenging and she doesn’t have tons of confidence in it yet, imagine doing the skill and feeling confident. Do this over and over again until it becomes real. Remember, perfect practice makes permanent!

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