Using Your Minds Eye for Optimal Athletic Performance

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Using Your Minds Eye for Optimal Athletic Performance

You are in the First Union Stadium playing in the championship basketball game in front of a sold out, wildly cheering crowd, with hints of soft pretzels, buttered popcorn, and sweat in the air. Theres one minute left to play and you are agitated, exhausted, and have cottonmouth from the stimulation of this once in a life time opportunity to own and flaunt a championship ring. The scoreboard announces that the numbers are tied at 101 and its your ball. Theres enough time to set up the much rehearsed play, with yourself as the go to player to sink the winning three. After taunting the defense by passing on the perimeter, its time to make a deep v-cut, run off the double screen, and set up on the three point line by the baseline for the winning shot. The crisp pass is headed directly for your open hands, such that the rough, rubber grips on the basketball depicts a perfect rotation and arc as it spins through the air just as the buzzer bleats and an awestricken hush resounds in the stadium. Come game day, you will be relaxed and confident so that this scenario will happen.

Visualization is a type of mind- body therapy used in athletics to enhance, relax, and control athletes behavior or control physiological responses (1). The main goal of visualization or guided imagery is to have the imagined and desired outcome occur (1). Using repetitive visualization exercises, much like the above, is an example of how vivid and sensually explicit imagery can influence behavior. The generalized imaginary technique begins with the visualizer taking an active role- first in generalized relaxation and then producing vivid and detailed images of specific movements or broad scenes (2). Th...

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...md.com/content/article/17728.57992&referer=http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web2/Briley.html

5)Visualization: A Powerful Tool, by Susan Pilgrim, Ph.D. Canada

http://www.pertinent.com/pertinfo/business/cpilgrim20.html

6)Study Sheds New Light on How the Minds Eye Works, by Roxanne Moster, U. of CA Nov, 2000.

http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/ucla-ssn110900.html

7)Minds Eye Recreates Visual Memories, by William J. Cromie April 1999

http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/ucla-ssn110900.html

8)Fooling the Minds Eye, from the Daily InScight July 1998 American Association for Advancement of Science

http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/07131998/grapha.htm

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http://www.clinicalsocialwork.com/mind-body.html

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