THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYcan be short-lived. They recommended completing mental rehearsal
every one to two weeks. They also found that mental practice produces
diminishing returns the more you do it, and suggested that sessions of
twenty minutes gave the best results.
Exactly how you should go about visualizing a given technique depends
on your skill level. In a 2008 study, Sian Beilock at the University of
Chicago tested the putting accuracy of novice and experienced golfers
after they had performed one of two visualization practice sessions –
either imagining performing a putt as quickly as possible or imagining
performing a putt at leisure. The outcome depended on experience: the
novice golfers benefited most from the slow visualization task whereas
the experienced golfers benefited most from the quick version. This
corresponds with the research showing that experienced athletes can
benefit from executing moves quickly, because it stops them from
thinking too much about actions which have become automatic. Novices,
by contrast, typically benefit from taking their time and thinking about
actions which are not yet familiar.
Believe it or not, there’s also research suggesting that the mere thought
of performing exercises can increase muscle power. Vitoth Ranganathan
of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation led a twelve-week study in which, for
fifteen minutes five times a week, participants imagined pushing their
little finger against a resisting force with all their might. Amazingly,
the mental training increased the participants’ little-finger strength by
forty percent compared with before the training, whereas no change in
strength was observed among a control group who didn’t do the mental
training. A comparison group who used actual physical exercises to train
their little finger exhibited increased strength of 53 percent. Ranga-
nathan said that the mental training (like the physical training) had
increased the size of the signal sent from the brain to the muscles, thus
increasing muscle strength when an actual movement was performed.
Finally, imagine you could take an inert substance, which, because you
believed it was something more potent, actually ended up enhancing
your performance. Would there be anything wrong with doing that?
This isn’t a hypothetical question. The placebo effect occurs when inert
substances lead to real physical changes based on a person’s belief in the
power of what they’ve taken. The effect is usually associated with medi-
cine (see p.313), but it can also be exploited in sport.
In a 2007 study, for example, Fabrizio Benedetti and colleagues at the
University of Turin Medical School and the National Institute of Neuro-
science gave athletes injections of morphine during training to increase