Improving Imagery Ability
Why Imagery (Mental Practice) Works
Who Uses Mental Practice
Learning the Golf Swing (one thing at a time)
How the brain 'stores' your swing
Why too many mechanical thoughts don't work under pressure
After a lesson...Get a good nights sleep
Why mental rehearsal is so important and why it works
Why a pessimistic attitude is DEADLY to your golf
Expectancy responses
Start with a Vision
Placebo and Nocebo response

1. Improving Imagery Ability

Relaxation techniques to improve imagery and visualisation arise from two different concepts. The first is the muscle-to-mind concept which suggests that athletes can become so tuned into their muscles that they are ultra-sensitive to any level of tension and arousal. The purpose in learning this technique is to train the muscles to diagnose the situation, thus becoming aware of any tension and then releasing it immediately.

The second concept is the mind-to-muscle technique that is usually present in meditation techniques. Here the athlete becomes aware of arousal and tension, first from the mind and then sends the appropriate quietening or relaxation response to the muscles.

Both techniques are equally effective and are precipitated by an awareness that allows for any tension to be interrupted in the nerve endings as they travel through the central nervous system. Whether the nervous energy is travelling to or from the mind is irrelevant. The point being that there is an interruption of this arousal and nervous energy flow so that the message is re-coded for relaxation. Whilst this may sound very technical and neurological, research suggests that the techniques for quietening mind and body are really quite simple.

By doing the muscle relaxation before and after golf practice you are simply reminding the muscles, neurons and their electronic pathways to be relaxed for the next session. You are, in effect, building in a muscle memory similar to athletic skill development memory. When you learn to relax completely, you send messages to the entire body, offering a ground rule for how to react in stressful situations. This ground rule sets the stage for moving to imagery and visualisation techniques. When you are relaxed, there is no mental, emotional or cognitive interference. All the airwaves are clear opening up the channels for image clarity and visual fine tuning.

2. Why Imagery (Mental Practice) Works

There are some 100 research studies documenting the effects of mental training on athletic performance. Many sport scientists have spent the greater part of their career trying to understand this delicate relationship. Debra Feltz PhD and Dan Landers PhD, well known researchers in sports psychology have studied how and when mental practice best improves performance.

Two possible explanations emerge as to why mental practice actually works:

Symbolic Learning Theory
Imagery may well be part of a coding system that actually helps athletes to understand movement. The theory says that every move we make in life is first coded like a blueprint in our minds and in our nervous system, so that if we mentally rehearse an athletic event, we are actually blueprinting each move, making the gestures symbolic and making them more familiar to our body chemistry. By doing lots of mental practice, we are setting the stage for movement to become quite automatic and easy to recall. If Tiger Woods wants to improve his backswing he might break down each component of the task by mentally rehearsing a specific position. In this way he will be able to encode each movement of his arms, hips, shoulders etc so that it would be recorded as a blueprint for the entire backswing. Dramatic improvements in basketball free-throw shooting is credited to symbolic learning theory.

Psychoneuromuscular Theory
Mental practice works because even when we sit quietly in our chair and mentally rehearse we are actually producing very small muscle contractions similar to those involved in our particular sport. This is why this theory makes so much sense. In the mind of Olympic diving champions such as Greg Louganis, mental ‘faxes’ and other electronic impulses are constantly sent to the muscles and tendons to remind hem how to leap from the springboard, prepare to tuck, rotate for several spins and then unravel the body for a perfect no-splash entry into the swimming pool. These messages travel at lightening speed and cause the muscles to fire at appropriate sequences so they can perform the correct sporting movement.

The theory has been tested quite frequently by simply having athletes mentally rehears images and then measuring the electrical activity (with EMG) in their arms and legs. Richard Suinn, a psychologist in Colorado measured the electrical activity of a downhill ski racer while the skier sat quietly imagining the race course. The printout of the skiers leg muscle contractions and firings corresponded exactly to the terrain of the hilly and challenging course. If we mentally rehears our sports often and with great intensity, we strengthen and condition the muscle firings and neuromuscular communication lines so that the messages get there more efficiently and with greater clarity.

3. Who Uses Mental Practice

In the 1980’s social psychologist Jacqueline Golding, PhD and Steven Ungerleider PhD began an in depth study of athletes. They studied track and field athletes who had competed in the 1984 and 1987 U.S. Championships. In 1987 they initiated a study of 1200 Olympic track and field athletes, the largest ever carried out in the United States. These athletes were given a 240 item questionnaire that covered physical and mental training, strategies, injuries, mood, motivation and social support. They were surveyed in April 1998 before the trials and again in November 1998 after the games.

They found that...

Almost all athletes had heard of imagery, visualization or mental practice and understood the concept, and 83 % of them reported using some form of it. Equal numbers of men and women used mental training regardless of whether they had a coach.

When did they use it?
99% said they practiced before competition in bed before sleep, right before race day or a gradual build up to the biggest day of their lives. Almost 33% practiced during the event. Over 20% practice afterwards.

The breakdown of how often was...

Once a week: one in three
Twice a week: one in five
Three to six times a week: one in three
More than seven times a week: one in ten

They found that those who trained the longest hours reported more mental training. Athletes who had visited a sports medicine specialist were more likely to use mental training than those who had not. A visit to a sports physician suggests an athletic injury, and some injured athletes use mental practice because they can’t practice physically. It is also possible that athletes who seek out this kind of specialist for medical treatment are also the same ones who seek out special cognitive techniques such as sports psychology.

4. Learning the Golf Swing (one thing at a time)

No one totally understands how we learn to tie our shoes or play golf. A team of neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University has found that within the first 5 – 6 hours of practicing a new motor skill, the brain shifts the new instructions from short term memory to the areas responsible for permanent motor skills. As subjects initially learned a task, the pre-frontal cortex, (an area of the brain involved in short term memory and many kinds of learning) was relatively active. When the subjects returned 51/2 hours later, they had no trouble retracing the movements. But at that point, the pre motor cortex, the posterior cortex and the cerebellum (regions that control movement) had taken over. During the intermission, it seems that, the neural links that form the brains internal model of the task had shifted from the prefrontal region to the motor cortex region.

Even without practice, after 5 to 6 hours the formula for the task was virtually hard wired into the brain. This suggests that a newly learned skill could be impaired, confused or even lost if a person tried to learn a different motor task during the critical 5 – 6 hour period.

It is absolutely vital that if we want to learn a new move on our swing, that during a lesson we only focus on that ONE aspect to allow the neural connections to be made and then more importantly for them to be strengthened. Many, many lessons contain TOO MUCH information, TOO MANY concepts so that the skill acquisition process is impaired.

Find out why you NEED to train your brain and how science backs up our methods - Why your swing will always be somewhat variable and the necessity to acquire mental skills to deal with the inevitable inconsistencies.

How the brain 'stores' your golf swing

The idea that every detail of your golf swing is precisely encoded in a perfect neural map is an enticing and invited concept. Unfortunately this is not true. When you decide to make a golf swing, there is a motor programme for it in your brain. Instead of issuing exact instructions to the muscles that are not to be deviated from, the brain issues advice or suggestions as to how to get the job done. This makes sense since important local conditions, say in your elbow or hip joint, may not be available to the higher brain centres in time to make key last minute adjustments.

All of this is hard wired into our brains and our genes as a survival mechanism. If you knew only one or two ways to move your elbow joint, you would be unable to defend yourself if you were attacked by a wild animal, you would not have the flexibility of various movements to avoid the danger. Or indeed if a sudden jolt or load were exerted on a joint you would not be able to instantly adapt.

A motor control system that depended on a centralized command structure would not be the most effective way of surviving under varying conditions, so it is of the utmost survival value to preserve some autonomy at the local level.
John Annett of Warwick University explains;

“Although absolute values of felt force, distance and direction can be retained with moderate accuracy for short periods it is unlikely that we rely on simple sensory motor memory of discrete movements to remember how to perform skilled motor tasks. The world in which we live and the actions we have to take are far too variable for it to be worthwhile to memorize precise movement. It is rather through a set of outline plans……abstractly designed, that we are able to remember how to solve familiar motor problems.”

This autonomy at the level of physical execution is one reason a golf swing will never have perfect consistency and any player who has this goal is doomed to failure and frustration. Because of the design of the golfer, golf is a game of misses, and the player with the best misses wins. Nature cares only for survival and not one iota for our golf games. Knowing this makes failures more bearable.

Why too many mechanical thoughts don't work under pressure

Dr Debbie Crews, Arizona State University (2001), conducted a study with ten amateur golfers with an average of about five years playing experience, with scoring averages between 83 to 98. In stage one, the golfers were asked to hit 20 five foot straight putts on a flat green and see how many they would make. In stage two pressure was added to the equation: The golfers were asked to hit 20 more putts, but where told that they were being filmed for “Dateline NBC” and would be seen by a national TV audience. Stage three cranked up the stakes even higher: in addition to being filmed buy NBC, the golfers where told that they would receive $300 if they matched or beat their score from stage one – but would LOSE $100 if they did not. Three significant measures were recorded. Golfers were asked to rate their own anxiety levels from 1 to 10 before each stage, then retrospectively for each stage at the end of stage three; heart rate was monitored throughout; an electro encephalographic (EEG) machine was used to measure brain activity during each stage.

The Results:

“The $300 from Dateline was exactly what we needed to reproduce conditions that approach the stress of competition,” said Dr Crews.

All the golfers heart rates nearly doubled from stage one to stage three. The EEG results were similar, a significant increase in brain activity and anxiety as the pressure increased. This all seemed to suggest that the golfers performances would be similar and they would all suffer a drop in results. They didn’t, five golfers succeeded and won $300 and five failed. The split in performance makes a startling suggestion: Players who perform well under pressure have as much anxiety as those who choke.

“The EEG data tells us that it is not the level of anxiety that determines performance, but how the brain processes the increase in activity. The chokers had the left side of the brain doing most of the work when the pressure increased. The successful golfers had comparable increases in brain activity, but that activity was evenly distributed throughout both sides of the brain”

In other words, get the more creative right side of the brain involved if you want to produce when the pressure is on.
Imagery and target awareness are created in the right brain. When the left brain becomes dominant, the golfer becomes self-aware; ‘what am I doing?’ ‘How is my stroke?’ ‘Am I coming over the top?’ etc.

Felz and Landers (1983) performed a meta-analysis on 60 studies assessing the effects of imagery on performance. Although they found some studies in which imagery had no effect, and occasionally a negative effect overall the studies supported the use of imagery. The effect was least significant on strict strength test, larger for motor tasks and LARGEST FOR PERFORMANCE WITH A COGNITIVE COMPONENT. The effect was positive for both early and later stage learning.

Until recently the traditional view amongst scientists was that no new brain cells could be added to the human brain during adulthood; no matter what we learned or experienced. The brain was considered to be unlike most other tissues in the body, in which cells are continually being replaced through life. This view has been eroded gradually, particularly during the last decade, as evidence has accumulated that new brain cells are produced during our lives. (1998) researchers working under the direction of Professor Fred H Gage at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in California and at the Sahigrenska University in Gothenburg, Sweden, discovered that large numbers of new brain cells develop in an area of the brain involved with learning and memory.

After a lesson...Get a good nights sleep

Motor Skill Learning

A team of German researchers led by Stefan Fischer at the university of Lubeck studied 52 volunteers who were asked to learn a sequence of finger-to-thumb taps. Sleep after practice dramatically enhanced performance of the task, both in speed and accuracy. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers concluded that the study demonstrated “an essential role of sleep in the formation of memory for motor skills”

Why mental rehearsal is so important and why it works

Researchers at Oxford University, England undertook a study to find out whether a person with two left feet could appreciate dance to the same degree as a performer such as Deborah Bull from the Royal Ballet. They scanned her brain to monitor its activity as she watched herself dancing AND when she simply imagined herself dancing. Using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures changes in blood flow in brain areas, Donna Lloyd and her colleagues at Oxford discovered that an area next to the motor cortex – the part of the brain that actually makes the limbs move – was being used both when Miss Bull watched dance and when she imagined herself dancing. This area, the premotor cortex, is involved in planning movements. But part of it, the “mirror neuron area”, has been shown to be active when monkeys watch movements made by others. This was the area activated in Miss Bull’s brain as she watched and imagined dance. The mirror area is part of the section that controls speech, leading some theorists to suggest that it may have played a role in imitation and gesture used by our ancestors before verbal communication. When Miss Bull watched others dance, she went through the same motions in her mind. “Our brains fire in exactly the same way as the dancers on the stage.” Lloyd states. “it could impact on the way we teach children to dance and the way professional companies schedule their work.” Miss Lloyd, a non dancer, underwent the brain scans whilst watching the same dance piece. Although her brain lacked activation of the mirror area, the response was similar. Miss Bull said: My brain fired tremendously, because I recognised those movements, Donna’s also fired even though she has never done them. Miss Lloyd added: “This is an area that operates in us all but can be made to respond more specifically, given the experience of the individual.”

In a recent study by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation U.S.A.(2001), volunteers were put through a rigorous programme of mental gymnastics where they vividly imagined lifting heavy weights to develop their biceps, without actually doing any lifting at all, they improved their strength by 13%.

Richard Suinn, a professor at Colorado State University, trained Olympic athletes using a method he called visio-motor behavioural rehearsal (VMBR). Athletes went through a stage of mental and physical relaxation and then mentally rehearsed the movements they wanted to make in the sport. Suinn measured the muscle activity in the legs of skiers as they imagined a downhill run with electromyographic (EMG) readings. He found that the electrical patterns in the muscles were very close to those that would have occurred if these men had been skiing for real. There was even a final burst of muscle activity as the subjects imagined themselves passing the finishing line and slowing themselves down.

A study by Barbara Kolonay in 1977 used free throws in basketball, with the study group one used imagery and relaxation, one imagery alone, the other relaxation alone, the combined imagery AND relaxation significantly improved more than the two other groups.

John Gruzelier, professor of psychology at the Imperial College of Medicine (2001), recently released a study about students about to sit an exam. He found that those who used dynamic imagery- visualising, for example, their antibodies as sharks patrolling their immune system, gobbling up invaders- developed significantly higher levels of lymphocytes (the tools of the immune system) and fewer colds

Why a pessimistic attitude is DEADLY to your golf

Martin Seligman (1990) a Harvard psychologist, proposes three predictions regarding sport.

1. Everything else being equal, the individual with the more optimistic explanatory style will go on to win. He will win because he will try harder, particularly after defeat or under a stiff challenge.
2. The same principle holds true for teams. If a team can be characterised by its level of optimism, the more optimistic team should win – if talent is equal – and this phenomenon is most apparent under pressure.
3. The most exciting point, when athletes explanatory style is changed from pessimistic to optimistic, they will win more, particularly under pressure.

Meaning Model and brain Chemistry (Howard Brody, MD)

1) If patient thinks differently, then the chemistry of the brain must undergo a change, because consciousness and brain chemistry are correlated.
2) If brain chemistry undergoes a change, then certain other biochemical pathways which link the brain to the rest of the body could undergo changes as well.
3) If those brain-body pathways undergo changes, then the tissues of the body which are influenced by those pathways could also be changed.
4) If bodily tissues are changed by these biochemical influences, then healing can occur.

Beliefs……Beliefs…..

Be careful what you believe in!

Expectancy responses

New York (1975) a well known psychologist approached a school to utilize two teachers and two groups of students.
Group 1, teacher A was told was a group of superior students. All the students have a very high IQ he is told. Do not tell the students or any other teachers. We (the principal and the psychologist) expect you to have a great year. Exit teacher A

Teacher B enters and is shared the following news… the students that you have (Group 2) are students who are not doing very well. They have very low IQ’s. Do not tell the students or any other teachers. Do your best. Exit teacher B.

Eight months into the study the research project is stopped because the students in Group 1 almost all have an “A” average. The students in Group 2 are averaging a “D” grade. The punch line……

The students were randomly assigned to the groups. There was NO difference in the average IQ of the students! The study was immediately stopped and has never been repeated since.

Pia Nilsson (1997)
National Golf Team’s success.
“Non of them involves changing the swing, It is certainly true that improving the swing is an important part of playing better, but as a coach I’ve seen tremendous evidence that every golfer can shoot lower scores by taking other important keys into consideration.

Start with a Vision

The team shares two common beliefs. First, that they develop as human beings through the game of golf. By this I mean that the person is always more important than the result on the scorecard. At the same time it is an approach that I believe leads to the very best performance. The more that I get to know myself and develop the qualities I want, the better my prospects for performing well. I will have a better chance of being able to change my state of mind when needed and coach myself in other ways. I also want to feel free to perform at my very best without any interference, internal or external.

Second, we have “54 Vision” Originally conceived by Kjell Enhager, a former golf professional who now consults on leadership issues in the corporate world, it is our blueprint, our conception of the perfect round. To shoot 54 means birdying every hole on a par 72 course. Many of you have birdied every hole on your home course at some time; it is just that you have not done it in the same round. The world is full of self-perceived limits that stop us from being as good as we really are. Rockets to the moon, air travel, television are all examples of ideas thought to be impossible before they became reality. In sports, there was Bjorn Borg’s two- handed backhand and Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile. Someone believed it, drew up the blueprint, and dared to be different. Someone went through the many trials that didn’t produce the desired results, but chose to see those trials as experiences that lead to the right solution.

Willi Railo (2002)
Athletes normally contact me wanting to improve their performance. They want to raise their upper mental limit. I usually tell them ‘ we won’t start there. We’ll begin by dropping your lower mental limits. You’ll have the security of overcoming greater failures than you have experienced so far.’

In order to raise our upper mental limit, we generally have to drop our lower limit. This is not about changing goals. That’s a completely different thing. Here we are talking about extending the security zone- both downwards and upwards.
We have good examples in ball sports of how the two boundaries work together. If were afraid of missing, we’ll also find it difficult to hit those winning shots. But if we dare to miss, we can also dare hit the winners. We must dare to fail in order to win.

Placebo and Nocebo response

Kevin Hogan (1999)
A recent report in JAMA (journal of the American Medical Association) showed that over 7 in 10 people with asthma, given an inhaler filled with water had their asthma attacks stopped. The people with asthma didn’t know that the inhaler had water, they were certain that it was the same medicine they had been using for years. Pain analgesics have been tested time and time again against a placebo (an inert pill) and it has been found that about 35% of all people utilizing a placebo for the reduction of pain experience about 50% reduction in pain. Dr Frederick Evans, a clinical psychologist has discovered that about 55% of the effectiveness of numerous drugs is actually wrapped up in the placebo response itself (Placebo: Theory, Research and Mechanism, 1985) “ in other words, the effectiveness of a placebo compared to standard doses of different analgesic drugs under double blind studies seems to be relatively constant”.

Until the mid-twentieth century, most drugs prescribed by medical doctors were actually toxic and so the entire history of medicine until the last half century is really the study of the power of the placebo effect and response. “physicians have always known that their ability to inspire expectant trust in a patient determines the success of the treatment” (Persuasion and Healing, Frank, 1993)

Paul Martin (1999) a behavioural psychologist, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, describing placebo ‘ a palpable demonstration of how our psychological expectations can override the signals coming from the body’ recent studies show that the placebo response can work in up to 90% of cases for certain conditions, and in some instances prove more effective than the conventional medical treatment.

Dr. Herbert Benson, an American physician and author of Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief, believes that in its memory the brain stores certain pathways to healing or signals that stimulate the body’s internal pharmacy, releasing natural healing chemicals. He believes that the ‘placebo’ effect could best be described as ‘remembered wellness’ We have conditioned the body through past behaviour to know what to do when we experience certain types of ill-health.

Howard Brody M.D. Michigan State University, states that inside of our bodies each of us has healing chemical substances, the pathways of which, if stimulated in the right way, can be activated. If this is true of the way the body learns to heal itself, could it not be that this same type of conditioning not only locks us into habits but is also the device by which we can reverse behaviour.

The Nocebo response

The placebo effect can also be seen in it’s reciprocal “nocebo” responses. One kind of nocebo is seen in the patient (who dislikes doctors and traditional helping professions) who is prescribed medicine and actually has many side effects to the medicine when in fact the person is experiencing side effects to the traditional doctor. Researchers have found that typical “side effects” to doctors and traditional professionals include nausea, diarrhoea and skin eruptions (Wolf and Pinsky 1954)

Dr Clifford Meadford, Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt Medical School (1992)
Published an article concerning a white, male who was dying from what he believed to be oesophageal cancer, Medford was a consultant on the case, the man asked Meadford if he could just live until Christmas, it was summer and the condition was grim. The entire staff, friends and family did everything that they could to help the man and he amazingly improved. Dramatically so. He was healthy and you wouldn’t know that he had cancer. In January he was re-admitted to the hospital and died within 24 hours. The cancer turned out to be one and one only nodule. It had not spread as had been suspected. A previous liver scan showing cancer was a false positive

The only thing that could be determined was that “… he died thinking he was dying of cancer, a belief shared by his wife, family, his surgeons and me his consultant."

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