Summer Camp in Dordrecht, Netherlands

There is another superb training camp in Dordrecht in the Netherlands the 15th-19th August, with top players and coaches from Netherlands, Belgium and wider. There are only a few places left so if you are interested contact me quickly at brainspecsports@gmail.com
You could tie it in the with the camp in Bishop Auckland the week before and have 2 intensive weeks of training to get you ready for the new season!

Summer Camp in Bishop Auckland

This year there will be a table tennis summer training camp at Bishop Auckland TTC. Running from the 8th-12th August it will include top class coaches and included are 2 sport psychology workshops. There are still some places left so if you are interested contact me at brainspecsports@gmail.com for more information and to sign up.

Creating Accountability in an individual sport

The Expert in a Year challenge was a huge success! Ok, not a success in achieving its goal of Sam reaching the top 250. Sam will even admit he was not even close to being successful based on his goal...
But it was a success in perseverance, a success in keeping up the challenge even on the days when they didn't want to. Keeping up the challenge on those cold, tired, busy mornings and, to be perfectly honest, nobody would really blame them for taking an extra hour in bed, eating that extra scoop of ice cream, drinking that extra beer. But they didn't, they kept going.
This says a lot about the internal motivation that they possessed. That drive inside them to achieve the goal was undoubtedly strong. However at times even that would fail them, so what kept them going?

Accountability

One of the big things that kept them going was their accountability. In a team sport, like football you have the rest of your teammates relying upon you to do what you have to do for you all to succeed. That group is with you on the training pitch, with you in the gym, watching whether you are slacking or not. And if they catch you slacking, they are sure to let you know. While this is not the best reason to be your first call for why you do these things, when that primary internal reason fails, this is a very helpful backup to push you through those momentary dark times.
Those momentary dark times, when your primary motivation is failing is when you are most likely to give up, that nagging thought in the back of your mind- `missing one session won't make a difference`- can become even stronger and once that takes hold it can easily lead to a slippery slope to more and more missed sessions, and even giving up. So having that team around you to support you and push you through those particular time can be very helpful.
However, what if you don't have a team around you? If you play an individual sport, sometimes you have those days and days of activities and training sessions where there is not another person in sight. And if there is another person in sight they are most likely just focusing on their own thing and don't care what you are doing. Perhaps it is even beneficial to them to not care if you slack off or miss a session because they may be a direct competitor of yours.
So how do you keep this accountability through these times.

Find `training buddies`

Exercise clubs and gyms have been offering deals for `gym buddies` for a while now. Come along with a friend and you both get a discount. Partly this is for their own gain- getting 2 people in the gym means more money than 1 person- but also it is to help encourage more regular attendance and therefore a fitter population. You can incorporate this into your own plans. Find someone who has similar goals to you and make an agreement to push each other. Wherever possible to train at the same times (together) and keep each other honest about it. Skipping a session should not be ok (unless for extreme circumstances) and you should feel comfortable telling each other that!

Find `accountability supporters`

Make a commitment to inform other people of your progress. Sam had many many people regularly following his progress. If he slacked off, thousands of people would know about it. Ok, telling the whole internet might be a big step, but this can be as simple as telling a few close trusted friends, `this is what I want to do`, and give them permission to challenge you on it, ask about how it is going, this will help them to give you the push when you need it.

Be honest!

If you are not honest about how much you are actually doing, how will your training buddies and supporters know when to push you, when to comfort you, when to congratulate you? If you are not honest with them they are not effective.

(In England at least) I have found that there is a certain pressure to play down the amount of work you are putting in. There appears to be more adulation to be attained from seeming to winning/improving effortlessly. It is seen as good to boast how little training you have been able to do but still win, as if the `natural` ability is to be praised. When people make an honest effort to work hard for their goal and take things as professionally as possible they get shot down and laughed at. If you begin being more honest about how much you have trained, how hard you work, how much you want to win, perhaps others will also start to feel comfortable sharing their effort levels. All of a sudden there begins to be a shift in the `culture` towards one that sees working hard as acceptable.

On the other hand sometimes people like to boast about how much they have done. This is also not helpful, as other people be easily discouraged by comparison or also the lack of improvement seen despite `all this work you're doing` in the end will show you to be exaggerating.


What do you think? Please leave your feedback at the bottom of the page and if you found this interesting check out some of the other posts on the website or get in touch at brainspecsports@gmail.com

England- Book your Brain-SPEC workshops in May!

Brain-SPEC will be looking at setting up workshops in England during May. 

If your club is interested in hosting one then get in touch now to ensure the dates that work best for you are not booked up!

Prices will vary depending upon numbers of participants (the more, the cheaper it will for everybody!) and the topic can be specifically aimed towards your club.

Send an email to Brainspecsports@gmail.com to allow your club to benefit from a workshop.

Struggles of a Training Athlete- Focusing on one thing at a time

As mentioned in the blog post from the Expert in a year challenge Sam enjoyed his training camp because (unlike normal training), he was able to completely forget about all the other work and worries he had and solely focus on improving his table tennis. The other side of this positive thing is the way it suggests the other training he was normally doing was not 100% focused because he was still thinking about work he needed to do or other places he needed to be.

This has undoubtedly affected the quality of his training and therefore his rate of development. In the Train Smart Play Smart series I talk a lot about the importance of maximising the effectiveness of the training you are doing, and if you are not completely focused during training that will not allow this to happen.

So how do we enable ourselves to focus when training? Do we (like Sam) need to take ourselves away to another country and forget about all other elements of life? Perhaps your boss, partner, kids, friends, parents, bank balance etc might not be so happy about that idea. For most people it is about juggling all the elements of life in a way you can get the most out of each part.


Here are a few tips (that don't just apply to sport) on how to maximise efficiency through focusing on one thing at a time!

Spend time getting in the right frame of mind

The same way you would take time to prepare yourself for your best performance in a match, take time to prepare yourself for your best performance in training. Warm-up routines are a good way of systematising your preparations and ensuring you are in the right frame of mind any time that you play.

use Trigger Music/Video

As part of this preparing integrate some sort of music or video. Associate this music with your sport and then on those days where you might have a harder time forgetting about that meeting at work, the music will help to get `in the mood` for training

Set Goals and Plans

Don't just go into a training session without a plan. If you have a plan, then you have less opportunity for your mind to wander because there is a focused, structured plan to follow.

Shorten the training sessions- humans struggle to focus intensively for long periods of time, that means if you are training for a long time youre more likely to lose focus and that makes the hours you have put in less effective. It is better to have shorter, more effective focused training than long, unfocused sessions.

Schedule Effectively

Will you have your best training session straight after long busy day at work? Probably not. Admittedly there will be parts of life that you cant move around just to suit you, for instance you may have to work 9-5 every weekday whether you like it or not. However, within that week there may be days that are more or less stressful. So, if you can schedule your more intensive training for the days where you are less tired/stressed then you will probably have a better training session.

using these tips should help you to be more focused during your training sessions, and as mentioned at the beginning these tips can also be used in other parts of your life for instance to be more productive at work!

If you enjoyed these tips and found them helpful, or if you have any tips of your own, leave a comment. Also, check out the other articles on the website and if you are interested in working with Brain-SPEC on a more personal basis, click `contact Brain-SPEC` at the top of the page. This is the most effective way in which brain-SPEC can help you with your performance... and if you haven't noticed, the idea behind these posts is maximising that effectiveness!!!

Preparing for things going wrong

Sometimes things don't go as you expect them to. That is just the way sport goes. However what often happens, is that these changes or things going wrong affects you whole game and can cause your performance to fall apart. This might not even be necessarily anything bad, just different. For instance how often do see a team prepare to play a really tough team, then that team gets unexpectedly beaten the round before. As a result the team loses focus expecting to beat the weaker team easily and as a result doesn't prepare adequately and loses!


So how can you prepare for things going differently to how you expect? The answer is quite simple -

PLAN!

The old saying `Failing to prepare is preparing to fail` is particularly useful here.

As is `Plan for the worst, expect the best`.

An important part of good performances is the expectation of things going well, e.g. not expecting a shot to go on the table has been known to have a negative effect on the likelihood of that shot going on the table! So you need to be confident things will go well. However it is doesn't go as well as you hoped you need a plan B. That plan B is a lot more effective if it is pre-thought out.

So how do you make a plan B?

The simple, effective way is the `If-then` method. IF this happens, THEN I will do this...
spending time doing this before a match or a tournament is a very good way of preparing for the unpredictability of sport. Let`s think of some examples of things that could occur that it would be helpful to have an If-then plan for...

Tactics-
You turn up to a match and the team/player you are playing against is playing completely different tactics. How do you change your game plan accordingly

Conditions-
The day is unnaturally warm. How do you change your nutrition, game plan etc

Equipment-
your racket is slower than usual. Do you change your tactics or just try to take bigger swings etc?

performance-
you make a lot of simple mistakes on your backhand. Do you change your plan, use some mental skills to maintain confidence in it, persevere with that shot?

These show there are so many things that are unpredictable in sport and any one of these things could cause you to lose focus and affect your performance. So having a plan written down beforehand will give you confidence and a plan to overcome these issues.

Here are a few tips to make this planning most effective-

Write it down.
Having a written list (I find 2 columns best- an `if` on the left and its `then` next to it) makes it a concrete plan that you can carry with you. The symbolism of this should not be underestimated!

Think of everything that could possibly happen.
If you make an `if-then` and the `if` doesn't happen you don't lose anything. If you don't make an `if-then` and something happens it could throw you off your game just like before.

Make the plans actionable.
Make the `then` part something you can actively change and measure. `If it is hot, then i will drink more water` is not as likely to be effective as planning specific times when you could drink the water. `If it is hot, then I will drink water during every stoppage of play` Would be more likely to get you to follow through the action instead of being vague.

Spend time doing this before matches/tournaments and you will be able to refer back to these notes should something come up and remember what you planned to do. Even if nothing comes up you can go into it with higher self-confidence because you know you are fully prepared for anything!

If you found this useful check out the other tips on the website. If you try this please comment below with how you found it and any examples or experiences where this was/ could have been used.

Struggles of a Training Athlete. Avoiding Overtraining

In the previous 2 posts, Diagnosing and Monitoring Overtraining we have looked at the issues surrounding overtraining and how we can detect when it is occurring. This is more of a treatment of an issue more than a prevention.

This post will look at how to prevent it from happening in the first place. This is the best course of action as it creates a sustainable environment to ensure training can carry on at full intensity without the athlete burning out and needing to take prolonged rests or unnecessarily miss training through injury.

So what factors are import to avoid overtraining?

Vary training!

If you train one muscle everyday and give it no time to recover it will fatigue. This also occurs mentally, if you are doing the same training all the time, the player will become bored, mentally tired, and lacking in motivation. This will affect training levels and improvement. Varying training styles, exercises, areas of focus will help avoid this. It also makes more efficient training, from muscle standpoints. different types of training will work different muscles and therefore allow some of the muscles to recover. As any bodybuilder will tell you, you never train everything


Keep A Diary!

I mentioned this in the last post for monitoring for overtraining but it is so important that it is worth mentioning again. If you keep a diary of your training, your diet, your emotions you will be able to notice the normal patterns and then plan ahead to suit your training to these patterns. If training in the evening is leaving you consistently over-exhausted then look at if it is possible to train earlier. Focusing on improving weaknesses before matches is consistently leaving you low on confidence in those matches, alter your training plan to work on them earlier and strengths closer to the matches. (Look out for an upcoming post giving an example of training diaries I have used with athletes and better idea of how and what to include)


Train Smarter not always Harder!

I have a whole series of seminars based on this principle. Even the top professionals of any sport will not train more than 8 hours a day for any extended period of time. If that is your only job, then you might wonder why more people don't decide to train 9 or 10 hours a day to get an advantage over the others... the reason- because humans only have so much physical and mental capacity to train. Therefore the key is to make those hours more effective than other competitors. Having clear goals to each training session, spending time away from the actual training analysing training and matches, there are many things you can do to train smarter. (Check out the services part of this website to look into booking the TRAIN SMART, PLAY SMART seminars).


Factor sufficient rest into your regular training plan!

Pushing yourself is a key component of improving, in anything you do. However, if you push too far something will break! Instead of working out your rest days/sessions/holidays as and when you feel you need them, plan them in advance. Often you can be swayed by your motivation levels, pressure to improve your poor recent performances, the fact you do not feel `toooo bad` and do that extra training session that you regret the morning after when it means you are too stiff or sore or tired and have to miss twice as many sessions than you had planned to in order to recover.
This is not saying that you shouldn't alter your training plan. The opposite! Your training plan should be constantly evolving to suit your body and mind! But this should be done over a longer period of time. The technical terms some coaches use is macro- and micro-cycles, but basically it means long-term and short-term plans to enable you to play your best when you need to. Changing training plans every week will not provide a sustainable, stable base of training from which to improve most efficiently.



So that is the end of the Overtraining series. Did you find this helpful? Is there anything you have learned from your experience you can add to this? Leave comments below!

As always check out the rest of the website for more tips and also how you can contact me for more individualised performance enhancement training... There is only so much general principles can help unique individuals.

Struggles of a training athlete. Monitoring for Overtraining

In my last post we discussed some of the symptoms of overtraining. These are things to look for incase you are suffering from overtraining. This post now will focus on how to look for these symptoms more effectively.
The aim of doing these things is not just to pick up on when you been overtraining and therefore know when to take a rest but to notice possible overtraining issues as early as possible to minimise the negative effects.
This is why I use the word "monitoring." Monitoring suggests a constant regular process, one that looks continuously for changes and addresses them as soon as they arise. This is how you should be when it comes to overtraining.
So what steps can you take to monitor your training...

• KEEP A DIARY!

Diaries are great ways of keeping track of every aspect of your training. If the word diary brings to mind young girls writing down their new crush before bed, then you can call it something else, perhaps a "training log." Your training diary will not be a long text but instead more of a checklist of items that you will keep track of during your training. You should every day or every session, mark down the list of things in the diary and how they felt/went that time. For instance a rating scale of how well you thought you trained that session.

There will be a more detailed post on the sort of things to include in a training diary HERE

But this will focus on the things to include that relate specifically to overtraining.
Thinking back to the post looking at symptoms of overtraining we want to monitor these in the diary.

• Tiredness, lack of energy - on a scale of 1-10 note down how much energy you felt you had in that session
• motivation - on a scale of 1-10, how keen were you to practice that session
• concentration - on a scale of 1-10, how well did you feel you concentrated in that session
• injuries - note down any little niggles, injuries or pain you felt in that session

Plan regular checks, where you take time to look back over the past few weeks of training and look for any steady decline in energy levels, motivation and concentration. Athletes training regularly will have ups and downs in these but overall there is a general level where these values will be. If there is a steady decline then this shows that the level of training is not maintainable on a long term basis- something which will lead to overtraining problems.
Similarly everybody will have little injuries or the odd big injury but if you look back in your diary and see the amount and severity of injuries building up more and more, or a particular type of injury in one part of the body regularly occurring, then this is a sign that you are perhaps pushing your body too hard and overtraining.

• Discuss regularly with your coach

use your diary and discuss this with your coach. People are subjective when they fill in their diary, this is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because nobody knows how you feel better than you. It is a weakness because you might be biased. You may feel like your concentration is good but your coach has noticed it isn't as good as it used to be. Or, because you have steadily improved in training, you don't feel any different but in fact from an outside perspective your concentration and energy has really improved.

Therefore, discussing these things with your coach can be helpful to put your thoughts into perspective and also, if you are regularly discussing these things with your coach, then your coach will be in a better position to know how to vary training accordingly.

So, now we have learned what to look for and how to look for it, how do we fix it?! Find out in the next post Struggles of a training athlete. Avoiding overtraining HERE 

To see the original article that inspired this series of posts check it out HERE.

To see what else will be talked about in this series click HERE.

Setting up effective monitoring processes is just one way which Brain-SPEC can help with your/your team's performance. If you are interested in working with Brain-SPEC check out the Services tab at the top or get in touch via email

Struggles of a training athlete. Diagnosing Overtraining

Overtraining is a dangerous thing that people don't often talk about but is a big potential problem for those taking their training seriously.
People who are suffering from this are often worried about bringing it up as it is perhaps seen as a sign of weakness. It is definitely not a sign of weakness and it can have a lot of very important negative effects both mentally and physically!

Here are a few signs you may be suffering from overtraining

• after/before each session you are feeling more stiff and tired than the last one. 

This is a sign that your energy resources and muscles are unable to keep up with the training schedule. They are not being given sufficient time to fully recover and get stronger (muscles getting stronger is often one of the main aims of training!)

• you are losing motivation and enjoyment of training

your mind, just like your body, can get fatigued. Everybody has sessions where they don't 100% feel like going- their favourite programme is on TV, its too early/late in the day, you don't feel like putting 100% effort in today. Or they don't fully enjoy training (naturally there are parts of training that few people enjoy- who enjoys that feeling of oxygen debt?!)

But if the overall enthusiasm and enjoyment of training is consistently dwindling then this could be a sign you are overtraining

• you are picking up lots of little injuries and perhaps a few big injuries

Is your wrist consistently swelling up after training sessions? Are your quadriceps consistently sore?Have you had a few muscle strains recently? Picking up injuries are sometimes a part of training and are difficult to be avoided, but if you are getting lots of them it is perhaps time to stop and think about why this could be! Swelling of joints and tightness of muscles is often a sign of muscle overuse, so if you are getting these a lot it is a sign you might be overtraining

• do you find it more and more difficult to focus during training

you used to be able to focus for hours working hard on one specific exercise given in training. Now you're finding 5 minutes of one drill leaves you losing concentration, chatting, messing about, staring at the ceiling. Everybody is different with how easily they can concentrate and you may not find it as easy to focus for as long as your training partner. But, have you noticed that, compared to yourself, you seem to be a lot worse than normal. If the answer is consistently yes, then you could be overtraining!

These are just some of the symptoms of overtraining. One of the important things to note is that in all of these symptoms there is an emphasis on CONSISTENCY. Everybody has natural ups and downs in these things but if it is a consistent downward pattern then it could indicate overtraining.

They can be easily looked for and a number of things can be done to combat overtraining. These are discussed in part 2- Monitoring Overtraining and part 3 - Avoiding Overtraining

If you found this interesting and have comments then please comment below.

Implementing training structures to avoid overtraining is just one of the ways Brain-SPEC can work with you/your club. If you are interested in working with Brain-SPEC then get in touch via email.

Superstitions: do they help? Pre-match routines and their effect. Part 1

Those of you who follow tennis will know that Rafael Nadal has to have things a certain way. His water bottles have to be on certain spots, he has to sprint to the back of the court at the start of every match, he has to correct his hair and bandana before every serve and I'm sure there are many more things he does every time he plays that we do not notice or see.
There are many other famous examples including footballers needing to put one boot on before the other. Clubs trying to change strips at half-time as they determined a certain shirt was bad-luck.
Even as fans, who realistically have no way of altering the result (particularly, even if only watching on TV) have our own little things we do because last time we did that they won. I know of people who decided not to go to any of the games because every time they turned up, despite being one of tens of thousands there, they lost, but if he stayed home they often won.

Some psychologists suggest the way we look at the world is as detectives. We look for patterns and connections in everything because we have this internal desire to link things together into a logical, cause-and-effect world. Coincidences are confusing to humans as it means there is nothing they can change to get the desired outcome in that situation again. Therefore they develop superstitions from wearing lucky pants to not stepping on the lines of the field.

Do these work? The obvious answer would be no, unless those pants were exceptionally comfortable and allowed a greater range of movement that allowed better performance than others then no, wearing specifically those pants will directly affect performance. HOWEVER, if wearing those pants mean he goes into the game feeling more confident, there is a well-researched link between self-confidence and performance. So actually, YES, those lucky pants do help his performance!
 Would I tell these people that their superstitions are stupid? Would I tell Rafael Nadal the way he places his water bottles is silly? No, however, I would encourage anybody with these superstitions to analyse them, do you really believe this helps your performance? If so, then I would not in all cases tell you to stop, but in the long run I would encourage more of a focus on preparation that can have an effect on performance (which may include those superstitions) which I will talk about more in part 2.

If you have none of these superstitions, is this a problem? No! Would I encourage all athletes to search through their results and find a link between one specific thing and all the wins and decide that must be a lucky thing to do, and adopt it as a superstition. No, I wouldn't.
However, are there parts of your preparations you are ignoring that could have a positive effect? Is warming up before the match a superstition or does it actually have a biological or psychological effect that does improve performance objectively?

This will be continued in part 2 where more tips on how to improve your performance using routines will be given.

Working on routines is just one of the ways a sport performance enhancement specialist can help, check out "Services" to see how else one could improve your performance.

Can high fives make a difference?

Sport is a very emotional game. In a team, or pair, or even individual game there are people that you

will look to share those emotions with. Even lots of individual sportsmen would want to share their successes with... some of the most touching moments in sporting history have been individual sportsmen running to their spouse or coach at the end of the championship. It has even become a somewhat expected custom in Wimbledon that the winner climbs up to their 'box' to share a hug and often a tear with those they are close to.

But is this sharing of emotion just a nice thing that can be poured out once after the end result, of could it be a factor in making that end result.

In team sports (and doubles) communication is an important factor for success- not only communication of different tactical elements but also exchanges of emotional information.

A pat on the back for a basketball player who missed a free throw may help console them, a handslap could reinforce a player who did something well, encouraging them to continue doing what they are doing, a team huddle may help build that cohesive unit that works so well together on the pitch.

One thing you may notice here for these examples is that they all contain an element of physical contact, or "touch".

Research done in the NBA, with some of the highest paid athletes in the world, by Kraus and his colleagues, showed the the amount of touch in the early season games could predict the levels of success the teams would show over the season. This factor was still important even when you had taken into account the early season performances and expert expectations for the team prior to the start.

This shows that teams that engage in more touching behaviour tend have more success...

Overall this is a relatively underresearched area so the precise reasons as to why it works are still unclear. Though research in mainstream psychology has long shown an ability to enhance a relationship through apropriate levels of touch.

What practical things can we take from this?

Well, the research does not show that touching more often causes more success, but it is linked. So, if you look at your team, how often do they slap hands or pat each other on the back or hug each other. If it's not often then it might be worth looking into the cohesion of the team. Are there any issues that may need addressing? Or are the players just not that close in general? Either way perhaps this is something the coach might want to improve.

It might be worth encouraging them to engage each other more often. I'm not suggesting there should be a mandatory hug between every member of the team between every point. But perhaps encourage a few more high fives after something good. Encourage the players to rally round a mistake with a few pats on the back of support to lift that players spirits back up. You may find that this actually has a positive effect on the general emotions of the team and the togetherness of their feelings and performance.

Paying attention to the correct signals

In sport sometimes it seems as though one person has "so much time on the ball" or "reads the game" particularly well. People often believe this to be a natural talent some players have more than others. Whether that is true or not is a long debate for another day. However, one very important thing to take away is that this is something that can be trained and improved.

What actually happens in these people is not that they aware of EVERYTHING around them (though it may seem that way). What they are better at is selecting quickly and effectively what they need to be aware of and pay attention to and what they can ignore. This tends to come more and more with experience. However "come with experience" is just another way of saying "learning through playing." This is not the effective, targeted training that is aimed for in the idea of deliberate practice and used on other aspects such as technique.

So, how can we train this in a more targeted way?

One good way is to video a situation from their point of view and replay it. I will take the example here from table tennis, since it is the sport I am most familiar with technically but it can be used in most sports.
When returning a shot the player has a very short time to "read" the direction, speed, spin etc of the opponents shot. This knowledge can be gathered by paying attention to certain things such as the bat angle and the body position of the opponent. Filming the shot and replaying it back over and over can give them that experience even if they are not able to be at a table.

However changing things up a bit can speed up the learning.

Slice the video so it only shows a small part of the shot, and then have the player guess the outcome of the shot (i.e. the placement and spin). Then importantly give them immediate feedback. This can be done by playing the video through to see the outcome.

If a player is particularly struggling you can slow down the video to give them more time to pay attention to the correct signals without it being TOO difficult. Then as they improve you can speed it up again. You can even go to a video quicker than normal speed in order to speed up the time in which they need to, and then hopefully learn to, pay attention to the signals and make a decision.
Another way make it more difficult you can also shorten the video to smaller and smaller parts of the shot so they have less and less information that they can use to make a decision.

Creating a Performance Persona

Imagery can be a powerful technique to increase sporting performance. Endurance athletes can imagine their body to be light and easy to carry. Cyclists could imagine their legs to be an engine that just keeps turning solidly.

The key here is the need to think about the characteristics your sport needs. For instance the 100m in athletics just need an explosion of power, so imagining your legs being light might not help here. Instead imagining your legs being coiled springs ready to spring with large amounts of power would be more effective.

However what I am suggesting here is that it is possible to take this idea one step further and create a whole persona which will compete “in your body.” This technique has already been used to Olympic success under the guidance of one sport psychologist I am aware of and I believe it is possible to use in many situations and sports.

It is often talked about: the need to “get into the zone” in order to give your best performance. What if it is possible to almost separate this into a frame of mind associated with a certain meaningful mental image. Imagery can then be used to remember effectively this mental image and the associated “zone” will then follow. This would make something that seems almost extraordinary and a uncontrollable phenomenon (the idea of “being in the zone”) into something that can be channelled and called upon almost at will.

Sounds great? If you can do this effectively then it has the potential to be. So how do we get this mental image associated with this optimal performance zone?

Firstly just like the imagery mentioned earlier you need to think about the demands of your sport. However you also need to include the mental requirements here too. Since my sport is table tennis I will use this as an example. 

Table tennis requires speed, agility and fast reactions. However, it also requires a calmness, clear thinking, and control over emotions. 

An image that I find to fit with this is the idea of a ninja! A ninja is quick, agile and sharp. When a ninja makes his move it is the correct move and is efficient and they make it count. A ninja is also always in control of himself, relaxed, smooth and calm in any situation. Sounds like a ninja would be ideal for the situation of a table tennis match!

Therefore if you can get into this sort of mindset you too will be in the ideal frame of mind to play the match.

To do this you need to practice the imagery of “Becoming” the ninja. Imagine yourself as the ninja. Look at yourself and see the ninja robes on your body, look at your bat and see the ninjas sword, gleeming, ready to strike with accuracy and speed. The key is to not just imagine being the ninja but become it, and ALL of the characteristics that come with it, physically and mentally.

Obviously, the “ninja” may not be appropriate for your sport, or yourself. So give it some thought, come up with an idea you like and give it a try. This technique won't be for everybody, but for some people this can be very effective.