As printed in the October 1993 Roller Skating Coach
The Healing Power Nancy King, M.S. and Dr. David Cook University of Kansas Coaches and athletic trainers used to assume that when an athlete was physically ready to return to competition, that the athlete was also mentally ready. Recently, however, sports medicine practitioners have begun to realize that the mental stress placed on an injured athlete can be as harmful and debilitating as the injury itself. Sports medicine has become so sophisticated that the physical rehabilitation for the injured athlete has been reduced to a relatively short period of time-often not long enough for adequate psychological adjustment to the injury .Thus, coaches, athletic trainers and athletes must recognize the need for equally beneficial psychological techniques to help athletes cope with injury .
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IMAGERY In many cases, athletes experience fears and anxieties about injuries even after returning to the playing field. Some of these fears involve re-injury , inability to perform at pre-injury levels and a lack of confidence. These negative feeling can lead, in turn, to depression which can reduce the athlete's motivation and desire to perform again at his or her full potential. In recent years, sport psychologists have used imagery as a technique to help athletes control their mental images to enhance performance and increase confidence. Imagery can be defined as "a set of organized mental pictures that recreate or pre-create an event" and is based on the premise that the body cannot differentiate between real things and imagined situations. Research indicates that the body reacts physiologically to perceptions created in the imagination. One such example is when a person awakens from a bad dream sweating, heart racing and breathing rapidly. If used properly, imagined self-controlled thoughts can enhance performance. Conversely, if left to run wild, an athlete' s thoughts can conjure up anxieties and fears detrimental to his or her performance. The use of mental imagery can be applied to an upcoming event and to potential obstacles or challenges the athletes thinks he or she might encounter during competition. Imagery also allows the athletes to mentally simulate his or her performance without actually expending energy . This is especially helpful when there is no opportunity for actual physical exertion, such as after injury , immediately preceding an event or when traveling to or from competition. |
SKILL ENHANCEMENT One type of imagery -task oriented imagery- allows the athlete to focus on the specific task or skill to be performed. This technique shifts the athlete's focus away from the fear of making an error and away from crowd distractions. Task- oriented imagery creates a situation in which an athlete must concentrate on a vivid image of the skill needed to be correctly and successfully performed from start to finish. Debbie Meyer, three-time gold medalist swimmer in the 1984 Olympics, used task imagery to plan her strategy in the 400m, 800m and l500m freestyle races. On the night before her 800m race, Meyer created mental images of her race that included all the senses --- she felt the cool water, smelled the chlorine, saw her competition in the adjacent lanes and heard the roar of the crowd. In her image, she completed the event and saw the time she had to set as a goal for this race . Meyer repeated this process many times before her race and then set a new world record and swam within .5 seconds of her goal time. She repeated the same procedure in preparation for the l500m race. Again, she set a new record and bettered her lifetime best by five seconds. Two days later, Meyer was to swim the 400m freestyle. Feeling successful as a result of her previous wins, she assumed she was also mentally ready for this race and didn't prepare for it as she had done for the other two. She swam this race with no vivid picture of her strategy or the goal time she hoped to accomplish. As a result, her time was four seconds slower than her best time and a recap of the race showed very erratic l00m splits. Afterwards, Debbie commented that the 400m was the most difficult race of all because she felt she had no clear idea of where the race was going and how it would end. This example illustrates that mental images can produce positive, confidence-building thoughts that will enhance performance . |
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