Sport Visualization for the Elite Athlete: Build Mental Imagery Skills to Enhance Athletic Performance, Paperback/Bill Bodri

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Description Sport visualization skills, the ability to create mental images of a perfected athletic performance in your mind, are extremely powerful tools for helping individuals achieve their athletic best. Legendary sports figures like Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Michael Jordan, Jerry West, Michael Phelps, Muhammad Ali, Pele, Ronaldinho and countless Olympic champions have all used mental imagery practice to improve their game because it indeed creates an advantage that adds an edge. If they did not think it worked then most elite athletes would not use it. Using mental visualization as a training technique invariably results in much better athletic performances so elite athletes everywhere are now using it. Seasoned athletes train to form highly detailed mental images and run-throughs of their entire athletic performance while vividly engaging all their senses in their mental rehearsal. The very best learn how to combine their knowledge of the sports venue, including their athletic skills and game strategies, with their mental rehearsals for excellence. Science has discovered that intently visualizing mental images of sports activities and actually doing them activates similar neural circuit regions of the brain. Because the brain doesn't distinguish between doing something and just thinking about doing it, mentally rehearsing an athletic skill can then activate preexisting neural pathways just as well as physical practice does. Refreshing that mental imagery over and over again is then like carving a groove into your nervous system, enabling your actions to become more automatic which is a boon if you are imagining great skillfulness. Done consistently, visualizing ideal, perfect athletic actions in vivid detail can definitely help you reliably "hard-wire" a great performance in your brain. Imagining yourself doing those movements in a perfect fashion will help you become better at their execution. Athletes practice visualization because they want to condition their