Mental Imagery, The Unused Weapon

You can use Mental Imagery for virtually any aspect of life, including academics, sports, stress management, and much more. But here we focus on improving body movement for sports.

Mental Imagery refers to creating in your brain a simulation of a real-world experience along with the accompanying sensory information. It can involve any of the senses, but Visual Mental Imagery is the most common type. Here you are creating an experience from a visual stimulus such as a picture, video, or in-person event. Often when we speak of Visual Mental Imagery we call it Visualization; note that Visualization can also refer to creating a visual representation of data in a physical (as opposed to mental) format such as producing an x-y graph from a data set. But mental imagery refers to a broader set of internally generated experiences since all the senses can be involved not just the visual sense. Another important type of mental imagery that involves our body sensations is called Kinesthetic Mental Imagery. 

Unfortunately mental imagery can be difficult if you lack the requisite real-world experiences. And even if you do have experiences to draw upon, how can you be sure they are correct for what you are striving to learn? Elite level athletes can draw upon their own experiences and they know what’s correct, whereas most athletes will struggle. Enter VISYN where we make mental imagery possible for everyone. Our Visual Reps combine a watching component and a mental imagery component in ONE intervention. The watching component is engineered with neuroscience to increase its effectiveness, hence we call it engineered watching. It provides guidance for effective mental imagery by providing the correct imagery, content for active guidance, and image sustainability with software that controls the entire process. Anxiety over, “am I doing this right?” is eliminated.

With VISYN, you’ll have the perfect biomechanics visuals to advance your visual mental imagery we call Virtual Echo™ and kinesthetic mental imagery we call Soma Sense™. During our unique Virtual Echo segments you’ll be echoing in your brain, this means imagining what you just watched. During our unique Soma Sense segments you’ll be imagining your body sensations as if you were performing the technique, simultaneous with watching. We guide you through both types of mental imagery to make it easy, for both form and intended outcome of a movement skill. Your training will be magnified and you’ll be using techniques used by elite athletes. Our advanced mental imagery is a patented process and a weapon now available to all. 

We see elite level athletes who are the best of the best (pros and olympic-level athletes) using mental imagery as part of their preparation process. We’ve also seen stories and studies around how people have used mental imagery in place of physical practice, with this leading to almost the same rate of improvement as if they had physically practiced.

Most of us, and in particular youth athletes, have not made a firm commitment to themselves to take a professional approach to their sports development. They may be a “driven athlete”, but as a kid, this is not the same thing as committing to an elite athlete lifestyle (nor should it be). Without that commitment, a consistent cognitive-control-demanding mental imagery routine is not a realistic aim. 

But the knowledge of what to imagine and how to sequence the focus of attention for maximum effect when thoughtfully organized, can build an understanding of the detailed structure of a technique. This is a large advantage when one is in a skill acquisition phase (ascending youth athlete or novice weekend warrior adult). It represents a huge opportunity to accelerate the skill acquisition phase, and as part of that, to defend against the risk of descent into bad habits.

With VISYN, driven athletes can now benefit from mental imagery just like elite athletes and in an affordable and easy-to-use way. VISYN is proven with performance studies demonstrating that athletes accelerate their improvement when using VISYN compared to “the usual routine”. Break the barriers that limit the value of physical practice alone!

Authors: Andy Blaylock is a co-founder of VISYN and VP with over 20 years experience as a hockey athletic skills instructor, coach, and product inventor. Charlie Levis is a Director at VISYN with over 30 years experience as a PGA teaching professional and golf innovator, and he also played college hockey. Jeff Thielen is a co-founder of VISYN and its President with many years of skills instruction experience in numerous sports, and he’s a licensed professional engineer.