Performing At Your Best: Your Imagination

When wanting to perform at your best, having a good imagination can be a great ally. And the good news is that you can develop a good imagination with some practice and diligence.

So how exactly can your imagination help your multisport performance?

We sport and exercise mental skills coaches/ sport psychology consultants talk about imagery as the tool you’d use as part of your imaginative repertoire. Imagery involves not just visualisation (eg seeing yourself crossing the finishing line) but also involves all the other senses as well. For example you can feel yourself exerting effort and the burn in your muscles as you push yourself up hill. You can also hear the whirr of your bike or the stomp of your shoes on the tarmac or the clean swish of the paddle cutting through the water. You can also smell your environment such as the smell of the bush as you run off road. And finally you can perhaps sometimes relate tastes to your training or racing such as taking in a mouthful of salt water in the sea or imagining yourself rehydrating with a certain tasting drink. 

Having the ability to re-create your training or your competitive performances in your head can give you certain advantages. Imagery can help with your motivation: some athletes find that if they can imagine themselves achieving something better than they actually can physically do at that moment that it gives them the motivation to work hard to achieve it (Hare, Evans & Callow, 2008).

Others find imagery is a great way to boost their confidence. Like preparing for an important phone call (to ask someone out on a date, or to apply for a job for example) you may go through what you’re going to say in your head in advance and what you may say in response to their reply. To rehearse in your mind what you want to do in training or in an upcoming race can boost your confidence in your ability to achieve what you desire. As most athletes who feel confident tend to perform better than those that don’t feel confident. Imagery can also benefit you – research has shown that when you image a task you use the same muscles (neurons) in the brain as you do when doing it for real. This is what people tend to talk about when they refer to “muscle memory”. In other words by mentally rehearsing your training and race performances you are training your brain to perform. There is evidence in ball sports of athletes who image their performances doing just as well if not better than those who only physically train.

So the question remains, how much can you improve your performance by also rehearsing/imaging it in your head before actually doing it? I challenge you to try it over a reasonable period of time (eg 6 months) and judge for yourself.

Imagery is not just limited to the realm of rehearsal – it has multiple uses.

You can use imagery to hone a new technical skill such as a change in running style. But you can also use imagery when you are injured. For the injured athlete who’s been forbidden to physically train by their medical experts, it is possible to find some relief to your frustrations in the use of imagery. When injured you can use imagery to imagine yourself carrying out your training schedule – which allows you to keep yourself tactically sharp and keep your brain rehearsed. However you can also image the afflicted/injured area healing!

Research shows that people can speed up the rate of recovery through the use of imagery (Levleva & Orlick, 1991). Often an increase in blood flow to certain areas of the body is associated with imagery of these areas. Looking at MRIs or X-rays of the injured area can help you make your imagery of your injured body all the more real. You could search the Internet to find a healthy version of that part of the body and imagine lots of blood flowing to all muscles and tendons in that area. Imagine it getting warm and healing –see it all mending together and getting stronger.
At the very least it can give you something constructive to do with your time aside from being bored and frustrated. At best you’ll be back training sooner and with all your imagery of your training sessions you won’t feel like you’ve been out of it as long as you have.

Finally, imagery can help you cope with unexpected and undesirable circumstances better, so that it has less of an effect on your performance – especially in a race. For example, what is your plan when you get leg cramp? Can you imagine yourself dealing with it adequately? Can you imagine yourself smoothly and efficiently carrying out your transitions? What if something goes wrong outside of your control? For example, you get a flat tyre or you trip over in the run? Can you imagine yourself coping really well and going on to attain your goal? Can you also imagine how you’re going to start or finish a race? Or each leg of a race? Preparation like this can give you the confidence in the middle of a race when things go pear shaped to keep calm and deal with it efficiently and effectively.

So try employing your imagination as part of your training regime and race preparation and see how it can help you perform to the best of your ability more frequently.