David Griffiths

What is Mental Imagery?

Mental imagery is simply imagining yourself in a specific circumstance and performing a specific action in your minds eye. These can be negative or positive images and have been the success or failure of many an athlete.

Good mental imagery is where a player can "see" themselves performing their sport well. Picturing themselves enjoying and succeeding at the sport will involve all the senses. They can see, hear, smell and perform in the minds eye, as they want to in real life. This process is best achieved when a player is completely relaxed.

What Can Mental Imagery Be Used For?

Mental Imagery can be used:

- See your success. Many of the elite rugby players have a picture in their mind of accomplishing their goals, both the actual process of performing and experiencing the good result.

- Motivation. Having images of your goals for an upcoming contest can serve as great motivation during training. It is something to strive for while training an intangible image that affects the tangible world.

- Perfection of Skills. Unbelievably mental imagery can actually aid in learning a new skill or perfecting an old one. Great players imagine themselves performing complex movements before they attempt them. They can see and feel the movements and use this to perfect their craft.

- Become Familiar. Mental imagery allows you to familiarize your self with unfamiliar things. For instance a stadium where you will be playing, or the plan for a particular game. All these can be "played" out in your mind and therefore will feel less foreign when the time comes to do them.

- Set a Positive Stage. In pre-game planning mental imagery can help set the stage for outstanding performance. When players can mentally run through all the key plays it will draw out their feelings and focus. This will keep negative thoughts at bay and only allow the option of success.

-Focus. Recalling past great performances through mental imagery can energize a work out or warm up. The feelings associated with the past success will put the player back on track to win again. Train players to use this process during a game as well, they will then be able to use imagery to focus and feel what they need to do next.

When To Practice This?

Mental imagery needs to be practiced every day and in a variety of situations. Like any other talent or skill set it only becomes better with constant use and refinement.

Do it all day long, before training and after and even practice it on other levels, like in your personal life. See yourself more successful in all avenues of life. As it applies to training, get to the place, where you see and feel yourself moving through the exercises and skills, picture them executed perfectly. Then do this same process again just before the game but include the game plan, reactions and plays that you want to execute, do not forget to experience how each of these will feel.

So What Are The Benefits?

To begin mental imagery you must use relaxation techniques and this in and of itself is a positive thing. These are a few benefits of relaxation:

• Faster healing time from injury

• Less stress related reactions, like tension headaches

• An increased receptivity to positive mental imagery

• Setting firmly in place a specific level of physical and mental presence before a competition.

Relaxation used in conjunction with positive mental imagery is helpful in:

• Creating self-confidence

• Having pre-game strategies that introduce players to situations before they encounter them on the field.

• Aiding the player to learn a particularly difficult skill set that they are trying to develop. They can do this in training or out.

• The Game