Using Imagery in Training
You can significantly improve the quality of your training sessions by effective use of imagery. By performing the skill being practiced in your mind before you execute it, you can focus on all the important parts of the skill. For example, if a golfer images a perfect golf swing before he actually carries one out, he is more likely to remember all the points that go into making a good swing, and maintain focus throughout it.


Imaging of an activity before its execution has the following advantages:
• It forces focus and concentration on execution of skills when otherwise you might just be tempted to go through the motions.
• It allows you to slow down and analyze fine skills or complex techniques to form as perfect a model of the technique as possible.
• It reminds you what to concentrate on to execute the skill perfectly.
• It allows you to compare how the physical movement compared with the perfect image. This helps you to detect faults in technique. Alternatively if the technique was better than the image, the image can be adjusted.
• In addition imagery can be used in training to practice sports psychology skills.
• For example, you might imagine appearing before a large hostile crowd, and experience the stress and anxiety symptoms that you might expect. Within your mind you can practice the stress management skills that will be explained later.
• You might use imagery to practice pushing through pain barriers, or might practice keeping technique good when you imagine that your limbs feel exhausted.
• Alternatively you might use imagery to rehearse and perfect strategies that will be used during a real performance.


Learning to Use Imagery
The following points will help with learning to use imagery effectively:

Imagery should be as vivid as Possible
A strong and potent image will be more effective and 'real' than a weak one when it is presented to the appropriate nerve pathways in your brain. Images can be made more real by:

Using all your senses in an image. touch, sound, smell, taste and body position (kinesthesia) should be combined with visual imagination to create highly 'real' images.

Observing detail of sensations such as the feeling of the grip of a bat, the texture of clothes, the smell of sweat, the feeling and flow of a karate punch, the sound of a large crowd, or the size and shape of a stadium in which you will compete. These can be observed in detail in reality, and then incorporated into imagery later to make it more vivid.

Imagining yourself within your body feeling and sensing all going on around you rather than looking on at yourself from a remote position. If you imagine yourself within yourself, then the image is more connected, realistic and involved than a remote view.


Start Gently and Use Imagery Systematically
As with most sports psychology techniques, it is often best to start gently so that the basic skills can be fully learned in a low stress environment. This means that you can be more confident of the effectiveness of these skills when you need to put them to the test.

Initially start using only 5 minutes of imagery a day, perhaps when you have just got into bed, or when you wake up in the morning. The number of minutes can be expanded as time goes on: typically many champions will do 15 minutes/day, although this may go as high as 1 hour/day just before a major competition.

Similarly, start using imagery in a quiet, relaxed environment in which there are few distractions. Slowly experiment with using it in increasingly disturbed situations until you are comfortable with using imagery in the most distracting environments such as high level events.

It is important too to use imagery systematically: get into the habit of practicing techniques in your mind before executing the in practice, and of using stress management imagery routinely. A habitual routine use of imagery will bring its benefits almost automatically when you are under stress.

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