Your Personal Imagery Program

Your Imagery Program:

1—Goal Setting:

Start with an imagery goal. Do you want to focus on technical skills (stride), tactical (strategy), mental (managing anxiety), or improving overall performance (personal best)?

2--Plan—Design a plan and schedule 10 to 12 minutes into your day where you can perform your imagery at approximately the same time every day.

3—Create an Imagery Scenario—write down your athletic imagery scenario in specific detail: location of the event; race conditions; specific event; thoughts feelings and expectations.

4—Relax precede your imagery session with some form of active relaxation such as deep breathing, yoga, or PMR.

Tips for Utilization of senses for Imagery:

Visual---see the course, the scenery, field of runners

Smell---scents of the environment and smell of sweat

Auditory—sounds of feet striking the running surface, miscellaneous sounds in the environment like crowd noise, noise and breathing of crowd of runners

Kinesthetic—transfer of weight as your foot strikes and coordination of hand and foot movements and your stride

Tactile---note how your clothes feel against your body and fit and feel of your running shoes

Gustatory—experience power of gels, electrolyte drinks, and energy bars

The more you utilize all the senses the more vivid, powerful and beneficial the images will be.

Attach positive emotions to the imaged experience—recall an event highly positively charged, where you experienced a great accomplishment, overcame an adverse situation, succeeded against difficult odds, set a personal record. Immerse yourself in these situations for a bit. Upon completion of an imagery session recall those powerful emotions. This will help associate the successful imaged event with the feelings of success.

Keys to effective imagery:

Internal vs. External images: Internal images have the advantage of emphasizing the feel of the movement and the emotional component of the experience.

Practice: Imagery is a skill requiring practice. Daily imagery practice should be adopted as a part of your training regimen.

Image vividness: the closer you can approximate the imaged event in your mind to the actual experience, the more likely the successful imaged event will transfer to your physical performance.

Controllability: It is important to manipulate your images so the imaged event is what you want it to be.

Relaxation: enhances image vividness and controllability; allows you to focus, immerse yourself in the images and reduce competing thoughts by quieting the mind.

Positive Outcomes/emotionality: focus images on successful outcomes, enhancing the emotional component and helps program the body for successful outcomes.

Image in real time: time spent imaging a skill should be equal to the time the skill takes to occur. Break down a marathon into 4 to 5 minute segments. (Start…battling the crowd; middle…as you push through fatigue; finish… developing that strong kick into the finish.)