The effectiveness of mental imagery in sport.

"I never hit a shot even in practice without having a sharp in-focus picture of it in my head. It's like a colour movie. First, I "see" the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I "see" the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there's a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality and only at the end of this short private Hollywood spectacular do I select a club and step up to the ball."

This quote was taken from one of the greats in golf, Jack Nicklaus, in the above passage he expresses the importance and the impact of mental imagery in his game. This is something that I want to discuss today.

According to Cumming & Ramsey (2009) imagery is defined as “an experience that mimics real experience, and involves a combination of different sensory modalities in the absence of actual perception” so essentially if we break this definition down it simply means creating a mental image based on a real life event taking into account relevant stimuli (e.g. weather, opposition and ground etc.)

This technique has proved an effective method within not only sports psychology but sports coaching in general. With supporting evidence to state that imagery can be used for performance enhancement, decreasing levels of anxiety, enhancing self-confidence, and self-efficacy are just some of the examples used.

In order to understand how imagery can be used within sports psychology, I believe it’s important to look at an example imagery script…

“First things first, I want you to completely relax, listen to my voice and my voice only. Breathe nice and slowly in and out… ok? I want you to picture your first century, visualise everything you can remember. Where was it? When? Who was there? What was the weather like? Picture all of those stimuli’s, now I want you to think back, how you felt at the moment when you held your bat up to the pavilion. What did you do right that day? Still maintaining a steady breathing rate, in and out nice a slowly. How proud were you walking off the pitch after obtaining this landmark? Everyone clapping you off the pitch. Finally after the match did you think to yourself I want to feel like this all the time? Every time you go out to bat from now on, I want you to visualise that moment in your career”

This script is aimed at a cricketer, being more specific a batsmen. If we analyse this script in more detail, it’s evident to see that there are specific characteristics for example, asking the participant to visualise a successful moment in there career, also picturing the surrounding area including opposition and weather which in some cases might be seen as irrelevant stimuli but for this task these stimuli’s are very useful in relaxing the participant. The next part is to ask them to evaluate their own performance (e.g. what did you do right that day? Where could you improve?). Once the self-evaluation has been completed it’s important to let the participant know that this activity should be performed every time they in this instance go out to bat.

In order to obtain the most successful and efficient results, most imagery scripts follow the PETTLEP model:

Physical- Imagine relevant characteristics (e.g. picture a successful cricket performance not football)

Environment- Important to imagine the environment (e.g. weather and opposition etc.)

Task- Relevant task being performed (e.g. batting)

Timing- It’s important to visualise the skill in real time, however in some cases slow motion is better for more complex skills

Learning- self-evaluation stage

Emotion- How did they feel during and after the event?

Perspective- Most effective when in 1st person but can also be used in the 3rd.

Most sports and exercise psychologists follow this model in order to create an effective imagery script, however it depends on the participant. Also it doesn’t always have to be a positive performance, depending on the participant’s personality they might respond better to a script designed upon a negative performance. This method is very effective, not only that it is widely accepted and used by sport coaches and psychologists all over the world in order to enhance performances, by alleviating psychological problems such as anxiety and improving self-confidence and self-efficacy.

However imagery scripting is not the only type of mental imagery, there is a thing called ‘pattern breaking’, this is something which we see all the time in professional sport but think nothing of. Have you ever noticed that when a professional gets angry, they take themselves to one side, I’m sure we’ve all done this at one stage in our career? I know I have… the amount of times I’ve wanted to pick my golf clubs up and throw them in the lake. This is exactly what pattern breaking is for professionals, something that helps them maintain consistency within their game. They visualise their role model and how he/she would react in the same situation there in, this visualisation causes a shift in behaviour from negative to positive. However this is something that a sports psychologist would’ve worked on with the professional over numerous sessions.

I think it’s very clear from the evidence provided that imagery plays an important and essential role in performance enhancement, that’s the main thing to take from this article. Hopefully I haven’t waffled too much, but this subject really fascinates me.

Thanks for reading.

#getpsychedgolfcricketimagery