Mental Imagery

You must have dreams and goals if you are ever going to achieve anything in this world. -Lou Holtz

Usefulness of Mental Imagery

There are many sports that require both a strong physical and mental game to excel.  More often than not athletes will focus their attention only on their physical skills, when in reality success comes from spending as much time if not more developing their mental skills.  The mental aspect of training is often overlooked.

How much of your game is mental?

10 percent? 20 percent? 70 maybe 80 percent? In a survey of professional baseball players more than half reported that the mental aspect of the game was 50 percent or greater.

The worlds most successful athletes and people in all areas of life know that once you reach a certain level of physical ability the mental ability becomes as important if not more important that the physical skills.

Assessing your Mental Performance Exercise:

Close your eyes. Relax. Begin to recall your best athletic performance.  Run through the “mental video” of when you performed at your best, when all your moves were the right ones, and everything seemed to go your way.  You have no feelings of doubt, anxiety, or pressure. Some athletes describe performances like this “being in the zone.”

Now recall where you were, what is the day like? The field? The temperature? What are you wearing? Who is watching? What is on your mind? How are you feeling internally?

Begin to let this mental “video” wash away.

Now remember your worst performance.  A day when nothing you did seemed correct.  How were you feeling? What were you thinking? What was your overall mental state? Let that memory go. Come back to the present.

If you honestly asses the differences between your best performance and your worst performance how much can you attribute to mental differences? How much to physical?

Why Use Mental Imagery?

In a study conducted on the Olympic track team a sports psychologist worked on the teams mental imagery.  The team was split into two groups, the first group recieved mental training and the second did not. With in weeks the experiment was cancelled because the group that was completing the mental training was improving rapidly over the group that was not, both groups then received mental training.