How to visualize your sporting success: Visualization techniques

Visualization is a powerful technique from sports psychology to improve your performance and mind without periods of intense physical training. But did you know that keeping the physical aspect of a mental exercise program can boost those benefits even more?

Visualizing, or mentally rehearsing, running a race or part of a trail can have many benefits. It can help reduce anxiety, adjust or reinforce a certain strategy, set and manage expectations, maintain motivation, increase self-confidence, build skills to remain calm and focused in challenging situations, and prepare for different situations that may occur so that you are not surprised when they happen.

It is well known that visualization works best when it is used to reinforce good results, when the process is more detailed, and when all the senses are involved. What can you hear? Do you see? Smelling it? The taste? How does it sound?

Surprisingly little known is the research that adding small physical movements – such as hand gestures for certain parts of the route – takes the benefits of mental exercise even further.

In research on dancers, psychologist David Kirsh became curious about the use of hands to aid memory, energy conservation, communication and private practice. This is something you will see in rock climbers, hikers and other people who like to move. Called 'marking', it makes good use of simplified hand movements to practice or describe parts of the choreography (or route, or track), instead of using the whole body to practice a full effort.

You'll probably find tagging is something you already do – like moving your hands to describe the feeling of a chain of jumps – without thinking hard about how and why it works so well. And you've seen a lot of other riders do it when they're trying to explain a trail to someone else or to themselves.

Marking, combined with visualization, allows riders to practice the route while conserving precious physical energy. It can help reinforce order, rhythm and technique in certain parts of the route. And it can help us explain aspects of riding that we don't have words for. Like a piece where the trail goes (insert hand gesture and sound here).

The kicker, by Kirsh, thinking with our hands allows us to expand our mental resources beyond imagining every detail of movement. This is why tagging is more effective than mental simulation alone. A visual anchor helps us solve problems and strategies, for example, and hearing movement helps us establish a rhythm and plan what to do at certain points along the route.

If mental exercise is something you do, or have been thinking about trying, see what happens when you bring your body into the process more deliberately: run a route in your mind and pair small movements with your hands or arms to improve detail. from the route. A sweeping motion around the corner perhaps, a sweeping motion to straighten up, a slight push forward as if you were pushing weights as you passed the drop.

Try to imagine riding a trail in real time and check how the process works best for you. Does it help by remembering, by knowing what comes next, by building a physical sense of when to rest, take a deep breath or blink?

If you're feeling anxious about the trail, tagging can help you build a more manageable one. If straight speed is your goal, this extra practice routine can help plan and adjust your approach to different sections of the track.

From sharpening your way of thinking on the trails, to reducing physical fatigue, to adding efficiency to your movement processes, tagging, combined with visualization, is a great way to improve your mental and physical experience on the trails.