Muscle memory: The secrets of mental imagery

"You’re not in the Alps. You’re in your living room. You’re alone..."

The new way to excel at sport

You're sitting in deep, soft powder high in the French Alps. You're alone. The sky is blue, the air is cold and clean; you breathe in deeply, and it's absolutely silent.

You can feel the texture of the perfect snow all around you. As you stand to take one last look down before you start, you feel your heart start to pound and the rush of adrenaline.

Only you’re not in the Alps. You’re in your living room. You’re alone. It’s absolutely silent. And you’re using the most powerful sports training technique that no one talks about. It’s what gives the world’s greatest athletes their winning edge. It’s easy. It’s free. It doesn’t care about your age, gender, ability or sport. And it can make you pull a 900 in the halfpipe without eating shit, drop in from the peak of the world’s tallest mountain with confidence and poise, and slide deep within the guts of a Teahupoo beast as if you were Laird Hamilton himself.

Seeing is believing

Some call it visualisation. “Or, more correctly, Mental Imagery,” says Geoff Lovell, action sports specialist and psychologist at the University of Gloucestershire. “You're actually doing more than just seeing. If you’re successful, you'll have smelt, heard and felt. Furthermore, you will have had some very important and strong emotions. MI is so much more than just pretending.

Visualisation is a powerful preparation tool that can help you perfect tricks and master skills without taking trips to the airport, the equipment shop or the hospital. “When we mentally imagine a skill in our mind's eye, for example a big twisting jump on a snowboard, our brains go through exactly the same cognitive processes as when we actually do the skill,” explains Lovell. “Except the 'volume' of the nervous impulses sent down the spinal cord to the muscles are turned down.” Experts call it 'functional equivalence’, small nervous impulses that leak out to our muscles during MI, causing tiny muscular reactions. These ping your brain the same messages as if you were doing the trick for real.

Mind messages

"Studies have been done which had people imagining themselves running on the treadmill at different velocities,” says Jon Ford, at FordSportsPsychology.co.uk. “This showed that heart rate and breathing actually increased according to the intensity of the imagined exercise, despite no actual movement.” An easy example? Think about typing the word ‘visualisation’. Concentrate on each finger as you slowly 'type' the word in your mind. When you type the v, can you feel anything in your left index finger? It's almost difficult to not move your fingers. Your brain says 'v' and the left index finger is sent an impulse to move. Ever noticed your legs twitching, as you watch a video of a BMX race, ready to 'jump' in your armchair in time with the riders on the screen? “You've experienced 'efferent leakage',” says Lovell. “The theory is, these tiny messages then reinforce your motor programme, the instructions your brain stores for the skill.”

"Ever noticed your legs twitching, as you watch a video of a BMX race..."

In short? You’re learning. Fast. Really fast. The classic example of the power of visualisation arrived when three groups of US high school basketball players practiced free throws over a period of 20 days. Group 1 practiced for 20 minutes each day and Group 2 did no practice. But Group 3 visualised their hoop-shooting instead. After 20 days, Group 2 showed no improvement, Group 1 improved by 23%, and Group 3 improved 22%.

You don’t even need to be rested. You can do it with a broken leg. Or two of them. So if you’re injured, overtrained or off-season, MI is massively useful. History has proved it, and the results are huge. Aristotle, for example, suggested you should never think without a mental picture, while Gandhi said the following: “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” And then there’s 8-time world champion Kelly Slater’s testimonial: “I’ve always visualised how I want to ride waves. I’ve always thought since I was young that I wanna be able to surf waves the way I see waves ridden in my mind.”

Nicklaus’ knowledge

No surprise then that Slater is an accomplished golfer too. The most famous example of visualisation comes from planet earth’s greatest ever ball-hitter, Jack Nicklaus. “I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a sharp in-focus picture of it in my head,” explains Nicklaus. “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. Only at the end of this short private Hollywood spectacular do I select a club and step up to the ball.”

"Casting yourself as the hero also enhances confidence"

Note the vividness and detail of Nicklaus’ imagery, as well as his vocabulary: ‘colour movie’, ‘in-focus’, ‘scenes’, ‘fade-out’. “Creating a narrative movie is great as it’s so multi-sensory,” says Ford. “And casting yourself as the hero also enhances confidence, especially if your competitors co-star in the ‘film’.” It’s also worth noting that Philippe Petit, the legendary high-wire walker who danced between the Twin Towers for 45 minutes, daydreams constantly about his art – never once about falling – and describes himself as a “filmmaker who has never made a film”. By imagining a ‘scene’, complete with images and feelings of a perfect performance, you then simply ‘step into’ that scene in reality. You have five senses: use as many as you can. As well as visual (images and pictures), they can be kinaesthetic (how your body feels) and auditory (the roar of the crowd).

Mental trickery

And there’s more. “Imagine trying to learn a new skateboard trick,” says Lovell. “With its twists and rotations, it's difficult to understand how the different elements fit together. But by imagining the new skill in your movement memory, you can organise it into different stages, especially if you go through it in slow motion.” Get stuck halfway through a 720 and can’t remember what to do next, no problem. Just hit pause, rewind and play the scene again. Try this in the halfpipe and you might need a dentist on speed-dial.

"Try this in the halfpipe and you might need a dentist on speed-dial."

Still, just before you try that trick for real, bring on the MI one more time. “Running through a stunt in your mind before you do it tells your brain to select the right ‘motor programme’- that set of skill instructions stored in your long-term memory,” says Lovell. “Chances are, you’ll have several of these instruction-sets for the same move stored: one for doing it well, others for the bad habits you’ve been trying to get rid of.” If you’re stressed or have to make a split-second reaction, your brain snatches the set of instructions it uses most. Imagining the move right before you do it lets you check your brain has uploaded the correct set of instructions. See yourself getting it all wrong? You know you need to stop and prepare yourself all over.

Remember, MI is a skill you need to practice and control. If you imagine doing a skill well, your performance will increase. If you imagine getting it wrong, you're likely to end up in a huge mess. Take a cue from legendary wire-walker Petit: he refuses to acknowledge the existence of the concept of falling, won’t even say the word, let alone imagine it happening. Dialling up perfect images over and over again is just like boosting your skills with repetition of physical training. Don’t see jumps or tough corners as dangers or difficulties, see them as just another part of the course and tackle them in a positive way.

What you see is what you get

But success isn’t all in the mind either – it is vital to get your physical skills right, too. “If your stance is wrong and you visualise the movement in the same way, you are building faulty neural pathways,” warns Professor Remco Polman, sport scientist at the University of Lancashire. “Reinforcing your bad habits will ensure your looks and net worth aren't the only things stopping people from mistaking you for Shaun White."

Thanks to: Remco Polman (Professor of Sport Science at the University of Central Lancashire), Dr Geoff Lovell (sports psychologist at the University of Gloucestershire) and Jon Ford (sports psychotherapist of FordSportsPsychology.co.uk)

Text: Jonathan Crocker
Illustration: Lars Henke