Sport Visualization for the Elite Athlete: Build Mental Imagery Skills to Enhance Athletic Performance

Sport visualization skills, the ability to create mental images of a perfect 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, Ted Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Phelps, Launi Meili, Gustav Weder, 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 mental imagery 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 now practice 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 pathways in the brain. Because the brain doesn’t distinguish between doing something and just thinking about doing it, mentally rehearsing an athletic skill can activate similar brain regions and 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. This is a boon to athletes who are imagining great skillfulness. Done consistently, visualizing perfect athletic actions in vivid detail can definitely help you reliably “hard-wire” the mental blueprints of a great performance in your brain. Said differently, imagining yourself doing those movements in an ideal fashion will help you become better at their execution. Scientists also believe that the neural pathways of the brain more commonly used develop thicker myelin sheaths that speed cellular communication, and then become the preferred or dominant connection routes for nerve signals. If you want to forge really excellent neural circuits for athletics, you are therefore advised to repeatedly mentally visualize your best performances.

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. Among other things, athletes commonly use visualization efforts to improve specific skills such as timing an appropriate response of some type, hitting or catching a ball, making a turn, jumping better or running faster, or moving their hands, legs or other parts of their body in a certain ideal way particular to their sport. Mental imagery practice can also be used to master emotional issues such as boosting motivation, enhancing your confidence, and reducing performance anxiety.

Visualization practice helps prepare athletes for real competition. It can and should constitute an active mental rehearsal of how you want things to be in terms of your real performance. By regularly creating certain vivid 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 therefore 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.