Get Your Head in the Game: Visualization in Sports

Steven Petrov
The Paw Print

One of the most powerful tools that all of us were born with, is our ability to control our minds in terms of the predominant thoughts and emotions that we allow to exist in us. Why is this so important? Probably the most influential and astonishing breakthrough in the study of human mind was dealing primarily with our emotions and thoughts and with the fact that our minds do not distinguish between what is real and what is imagined.
Many of us will probably say, “Well I don’t really care and why should I care anyway?” well if you think about this concept for a second you will get to the phenomenal conclusion that practicing physically is not the only way to get better in your sport, or any other area in life.
Vivid visualization has been used in professional sports for decades with huge success, helping some of the best athletes to perform at their best every time they step on the field. Numerous studies have shown that if you vividly imagine and visualize yourself performing at your best the same muscles are activated and the same neurological patterns are strengthened as if you were actually performing the activity physically. In other words we all know how when talking about some of the top athletes in the world sports like Cristiano Ronaldo, Adrian Peterson, Peyton Manning, Lionel Messi, Usain Bolt and many others, we often say that their particular sport is like a “2nd nature to them” but what this often used expression literally means is that they have reached that level where they don’t have to consciously think about the game they play, but rather they have the confidence in knowing that the thousands of hours of practice are lying in their subconsciousness making them experts of the “science” involved. How can this relate to any other athlete out there as well as any other person who wants to become better in a certain area of his life: public speaking, investments, entrepreneurism, skiing etc.? Well, it all comes down to belief, consistency, and most of all discipline to start regularly spending less than 10 minutes a day visualizing our goals in life and living as if we have already accomplished them.
The information presented in this article is a scientific fact, and the main reason why people ignore it or decide not to believe it is the lack of discipline to stick with a simple mental training routine for a month or so in order to actually start seeing physical results for everything they have been visualizing about.
The most important thing to learn from this article is that either you decide to actually gain control of your own mind or not, there are hundreds if not thousands of negative images that we unintentionally visualize in our minds each day, under the form of worrying, fear, stress, anxiety, etc. so either we like it or not this process is real and better to use it for positive rather than negative outcomes.

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