The Sport Psych Training/Regatta series was about much more than two whacky regattas. It was a research study (and my dissertation) that compared 3 different mental training programs. One might say, “Mental training? What’s that?!?!” If you’ve been watching or reading about the Olympics, you have probably heard a little bit about mental training by now. Research has shown that you can boost performance by practicing your sport in their head. With visualization, you can actually have the same neuro-physiological processes happen as when you are performing the skill in actuality (EEG, EMG, and MRI research has shown this pretty conclusively). There is also research showing that these same kinds of processes occur when you watch another athlete do their thing. Amazingly, there are accounts of Olympic level athletes who have used imagery, while injured, and performed as if they had been physically practicing the whole time!!!
“Visualization,” “imagery,” “mental practice”—Whatever name you use for it…can be useful when you are injured, during the off-season, or to supplement the on-the-water training that you are already doing. It can be useful for several reasons…it can boost your learning/create muscle memory and it can also allow you to overcome performance anxiety--consistently reaching a zone of optimal physiological arousal- where you can perform your best. Learning goes through series of stages. When you are first learning a skill, you are in the “Cognitive Stage” (i.e., you have to think everything through). For example, a new crew has to think, “Now the jib is about to touch the mast, I need to bring my weight this way and get across the boat fast and place my feet under those other straps.” After you have spent some time in the Cognitive Stage, you move on to the “Associative Stage.” In the associative stage, you don’t have to think about nearly as many variables. The same crew, for example, may feel the boat on its side, glance at the jib, and simply realize that it is time to get to other side of the boat, etc. There may be no conscious thought about “straps” and so on, but with just a little bit of thought, they end up there. In the Autonomous Stage,” things happen more automatically. You feel confident and do your thing without feeling like you need to verbally analyze it. Thus, this same crew is able to do tac! ks, make adjustments to wind speed, etc, and get their head out of the boat to pay attention to other boats (tactics) and to puffs way up the course (strategy). A goal of my study was to develop a mental practice program to facilitate sailors’ movement towards the autonomic stage with several skills, or to help them stay there, if that’s where they are. Typically, when I do sport psychology work with athletes, I try to help them maximize performance by breaking their performance down into 4 components: Cognitive, Physiological, Behavioral, and Emotional. For instance, a sailor might say, “I suck,” feel their heart rate and breathing speed up while their muscles tense, grip the tiller tighter and steer more aggressively, and experience emotions such as anxiety. The chain can often be improved upon by approaching any of these 4 areas (i.e., interventions like changing self-talk, using diaphragmatic breathing, utilizing a performance routine, and by doing things like acknowledging and accepting emotions. For this study, I created an imagery tool by most heavily relying on a theory that was first created to help people overcome phobias. This “bio-informational theory” basically says that everyone has these 3 kinds of ideas or experiences floating around their brains: meanings, physiological sensations, and stimuli. It also says that when a memory (or network of these ideas) is formed, it all begins with the physiological sensation. For example, a new crew might physiologically feel the boat heeling, then assign the meaning of “I need to hike it flat,” and assign the stimulus of the puff that was seen on the water just a moment before. So…in creating an imagery script, it becomes very important to utilize various kinds of physiological sensations (e.g., tactile, visual, auditory, smell, and taste). Just like reading a good book, incorporating these kinds of sensations can make the image seem more real, and they provide more kinds of cues to pull from when your mind and y! our body are later recalling how to do something on the water. In creating my imagery tool, I incorporated these kinds of descriptions, and I wanted to also have as many meaning cues (e.g., “I need to hike”) and stimulus cues (e.g., puff) as possible, because it seems that more cues = greater chance of recall. In the creation of this imagery tool, I also considered theory of physiological arousal. People typically perform their best when they have some arousal (i.e., not bored or asleep), but they are not overly aroused (OK, Beavis & Butthead…stop chuckling). Usually, more cognitive sports, like sailing (not power-lifting), find peak performance with more relaxed states. When sailors are overly aroused with performance anxiety, their performance can take a dive as they shift from the blissful Autonomous Stage, or the Associative Stage, back down to the Cognitive Stage. A talented and well-practiced sailor may get clumsy or have to shift their attention from up the course to inside the boat, because anxiety is temporarily “destroying” their learning. This imagery tool is designed to get people in the habit of associating sailing with a more relaxed state, where they are more likely to consistently perform their best. I created a CD-ROM, with video, to teach people imagery skills for sailing. The video utilizes internal perspective (with a “head-cam”) and external perspective (from the coach boat). The number of stimulus cues is maximized by watching this first, and people are trained to cue into the “right” stimuli rather than leaving it completely up to their imagination. Whether it is mental practice or physical practice, many repetitions are needed to reach and/or maintain the Autonomous Stage. Thus, participants in my study were asked to watch the video and to use imagery during an abbreviated verbal script, twice per week, for 12 weeks (actually 14 because of snow). The video was about 20 minutes and was divided into 4 chapters: 1) Prepare your boat and mind to sail, 2) Acceleration/Deceleration, 3) Tacking, and 4) Upwind Boatspeed. I tested this CD-ROM against 2 other conditions. One CD-ROM condition was the “tried and true” method of imagery. There was simply a verbal script that was identical to the script that accompanied the video, except there was NO video. For the sake of consistency across conditions, this condition also had the same follow-up abbreviated version of the script (so people did the eyes-closed imagery twice). The third condition was the control group. This group watched kayaking video with cool music, and was told that watching greatness in one sport would carry over to one’s performance in other sports. Participants were randomly assigned to each group based on their results of the 1st event. It was important to have a control group to be sure that any “placebo effect” was not as strong as the effect created by being in one of the two experimental conditions. Now that the study is over, ALL PARTICIPANTS have the benefit of accessing ANY of the mental training conditions. To test the effect of each CD-ROM on imagery ability and performance, the following format was used: Sailors participated in a “pre-test” event and a “post-test” event. This way, we could tell if the training affected them. We tried to do it during the off-season, when everyone was doing no sailing, so that we could say, more definitively, why an effect was seen. Other steps were also taken to ensure that the results were not impacted by confounding variables… For instance, we had the same exact people/pairings at each event. We also had the same observers rating the same people at both events. The pre-test and post-test had the same essential elements. Sailors filled out measures to assess their imagery ability and the degree to which they think through their sailing. On the water, observers used a 21-item assessment to rate each individual’s sailing skills. These were the same skills from the video (Acceleration/Deceleration, Tacking, and Upwind Boatspeed). Upwind rabbit races were used to get race results while also isolating those same three skills (so that the! start and downwind performance would have no bearing). During the 14 week mental training portion, participants indicated initial relaxation levels, and subsequent relaxation levels, on-line for each viewing. After the 14 weeks, it all happened again. So hopefully this explains what the heck people have been up to for the past several months. If anyone has questions, please feel free to contact me. CD-ROM’s will likely be available for sale to non-participants later this year. Study participants will receive performance profiles (looking at their improvement and comparison with group norms) in the next month or so. I am hoping to defend dissertation in late spring and I will let folks know how the research turns out (hopefully the sample was big enough for some conclusive results). On a side note, I will be heading to Montana State University’s Counseling Center, in mid-July, for my year long internship (like a residency for psychology). In the meantime, I will be available for sport psychology workshops for high school, college, and yacht club programs. Please contact me if you have interest. Regards, Tim Herzog, M.S., Ed.M. _________________________________________________ maisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.collegesailing.org/mailman/?listname=maisa
