Introduction to Imagery

Background

Your body is a beautifully evolved sporting machine, comprising, among other things, muscles that can be trained to a peak of fitness and nerves that control the muscles. The nerves are massively linked in your brain: vast numbers of nerve cells are linked with a hugely greater number of interconnections.

Part of the reason that human children take so long to reach maturity relative to animals is that we have many more nerve cells in our brain. Initially our brains are very disorganized. Much of the process of growing up, being educated, and becoming mentally mature is the process of organizing the vast chaos of the interconnectedness of the nerves in our brain into useful pathways.

Much of the process of learning and improving sporting reflexes and skills is the laying down, modification, and strengthening of nerve pathways in our body and brains. Some of these nerve pathways lie outside out brain in nerves of the body and spine. These need to be trained by physical training.

Many of the pathways, however, lie within the brain. These pathways can be effectively trained by the use of mental techniques such as imagery and simulation. These are explained below.

Imagery

Imagery is the process by which you can create, modify or strengthen pathways important to the co-ordination of your muscles, by training purely within your mind. Imagination is the driving force of imagery.

Imagery rests on the important principle that you can exercise these parts of your brain with inputs from your imagination rather that from your senses: the parts of the brain that you train with imagery experience imagined and real inputs similarly, with the real inputs being merely more vividly experienced.

So in its least effective form you can use imagery merely as a substitute for real practice to train the parts of your mind that it can reach. Even at this inferior level of use imagery is useful training where:

• An athlete is injured, and cannot train in any other way
• The correct equipment is not available, or practice is not possible for some other reason
• Where rapid practice is needed

However just to use imagery for the reasons above is to undervalue its effectiveness grossly.

Unleashing the Power of Imagery

The real power of imagery lies in a number of much more sophisticated points:

• Imagery allows you to practice and prepare for events and eventualities you can never expect to train for in reality. With practice it allows you to enter a situation you have never physically experienced with the feeling that you have been there before and achieved whatever you are trying to achieve.
• Similarly imagery allows you to prepare and practice your response to physical and psychological problems that do not occur normally, so that if they occur, you can respond to them competently and confidently. Imagery can be used to train in sports psychology skills such as stress and distraction management.
• It allows you to pre-experience the achievement of goals. This helps to give you confidence that these goals can be achieved, and so allows you to increase your abilities to levels you might not otherwise have reached.
• Practicing with imagery helps you to slow down complex skills so that you can isolate and feel the correct component movements of the skills, and isolate where problems in technique lie.

Imagery can also be used to affect some aspects of the 'involuntary' responses of your body such as releases of adrenaline. This is most highly developed in Eastern mystics, who use imagery in a highly effective way to significantly reduce e.g. heart beat rate or oxygen consumption.

What to Use Imagery For

You can use imagery in a number of important ways:

• To feel and practice moves and routines perfectly within your mind. This helps to program and strengthen the nerve pathways within the brain that control the correct execution of the skill - remember that your mind is the control center of your body in performance.
• To prepare for events that cannot be easily simulated for in practice. This gives you both the confidence to deal with these events as they arise, and the self-confidence that comes with preparation for any reasonable eventuality.
• To experience achievement of a goal in your mind before you physically achieve it. This helps you to build the confidence that that goal can be achieved and expand your perceptions of the boundaries of your abilities.
• To get a feeling of experience and 'having been there before' the first time you compete at a higher level.
• To practice and program your mind when you cannot practice and program mind and body together:
  • When you are physically tired, or do not want to tire yourself before a performance
  • When the correct equipment is not available
  • When weather is too bad to train
  • When injury stops normal training
  • When you do not have the time to practice a particular skill physically
• To practice a particularly boring skill many times - concentrating your mind on imagery of the skill forces concentration on the skill.
• To study your technique in your mind, either reducing complex movements to simple skills, or slowing the movements down to analyze them for faults in technique.
• To relax - by imaging and enjoying a pleasant, quiet scene. This can be used most effectively in conjunction with biofeedback.

Imagery works best as a way of practicing and improving known skills, with known feelings and body positions. Whether or not it is an effective method or acquiring completely new skills is a matter of debate.

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 in order 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.

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.

Haverling Girls Basketball—Imagery

The following are things that you should “imagine” before all games and at any time when you feel like you are struggling:

*The perfect shooting form
*Shooting a shot in a pressure situation (of course with perfect form and a swish as the result)
*Going hard after a rebound, getting the ball at the peak of your jump (if an offensive rebound—keeping the ball up high and putting it back in)
*Running sharp cuts and setting solid screens in the offenses
*Setting up your defender on a screen and then running hard, using the screen, getting the ball and scoring
*A pressure foul shot (can win the game if you make two shots)
*Good defensive position. Staying low, not lunging, not reaching. Putting heavy pressure on the player, but not letting her get by you (keeping the feet moving)
*Being in help position, sliding over to help and taking a charge
*Being in your usual position in all of the out of bounds plays—running the plays perfectly and scoring every time
*Running the different offenses/options
*Beating the ball handler to the side line/base line forcing them out of bounds
*Going for a steal with the palm on the hand nearest the ball (not crossing over your body)
*Running the perfect pre-game warm-up
*The feeling of joy and happiness after winning the game!!

This is not an all-inclusive list. There are many other things that you “imagine” before a game (the roar of the crowd after you make a great move…). If there is something that you are struggling with currently, “imagine” that—you doing that task perfectly.

This is a simple mental activity that CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE! Use your imagination and become a better player (without breaking a sweat).