Psychology of endurance sport - visualisation

It’s your big day! You have trained for months and are ready for the gun to go off. But it’s not all about your physical state, your head plays a great role as well.

One of the ways you can help take your race day and training performance to the next level is by utilising visualisation techniques that will help you stay focused on execution.

Today, we will talk about the power of visualisation.

Visualisation

No matter if you are a professional athlete or an amateur, visualisation enables you to produce mental images of certain events that are unfolding in a positive way. It doesn’t have to involve only images. Athletes are able to activate some or all sense to get a mental picture that is as vivid as possible.

This enables athletes to reach higher motivation levels and at the same time relaxes them so they are able to react to different situations as they come up.

There is no perfect race, but you can execute a race perfectly

It’s important to realize that it’s not only about imagining a happy path. Athletes play different scenarios out and decide how they want to react to them so they don’t have to spend extra energy of coming up with a plan on the fly. They have already solve the problem multiple times in their head before.

Start small

Visualisation, like any other skill, is something that can and needs to be learned. Some people are more gifted and have a easy time visualising different aspects of an event while others need to practice a little more.

For those who need a little more practice, start by imagining something easy for you. Imagine yourself in your garden just sitting and watching in a particular direction. As it becomes easier to see your surroundings, try adding sounds, smells, and other sensations that you experience while being outside.

With time it will become easy for you to imagine these things. Then you can move to the next stage of imagining yourself in different race or training situations. Again, you start small and work your way to more complex actions and routines.

Perfect form

Now that you have a clear picture of yourself in a particular environment, you can start visualising yourself practicing your sport. Your form is perfect, you are able to keep this up for days and you just enjoy movement.

You can imagine yourself as an external bystander or as yourself moving through the environment. There is no wrong way to do it but you have to try keeping track of your surroundings. How much detail do you see? Do you feel the road beneath you? What about the sounds and smells? If you are swimming, do you taste the saltiness of the see or the chlorine of the pool? The more detail you can get the better.

Be true to yourself

Once you develop your visualisation further, you will be able to imagine yourself in the final push to the finish line. You probably won’t be as strong and jumpy as you were at the start of the race. You will be sweaty and hurting. Those are the sensations you have to visualise. If you are able to visualise yourself pushing through the pain, it will get a little easier to endure it on race day.

One thing to keep in mind also is the limitations of visualisation. It’s easy to imagine yourself running the 100-dash while it’s impossible to imagine every step of a marathon or even a 5k or 10k race. If it’s not a home race, the course will also be something of an unknown too.

That’s why it’s important to get as familiar with the event’s conditions as possible and go over the key points of the event. You will build confidence in your abilities and have a greater chance to meet your expectations.

Negative visualisation

Visualisation can also go into the other direction. You can have a few bad training sessions. You might have to stop early on your last key training session and now you start visualising yourself dropping out of the race or having a bad performance.

More often than not, this can lead to a bad performance. It’s critical to identify these patterns and work on building confidence by focusing on the bigger picture and not just the last few training sessions.

Endurance athletes spend a long time training for an event and it’s important to analyse the training as a whole.

If practiced regularly, visualisation can be one more tool in getting an athlete to a new level of performance that they thought was out of reach.