Coaches Corner

Introduction to Imagery and Simulation

Your body is a beautifully evolved sports machine, comprising, among other things, muscles that can be trained to a peak of fitness and nerves that control the muscles. The nerves are massively linked in your brain. Many more nerve cells are linked with a greater number of interconnections.

Much of the process of learning and improving fencing reflexes and skills is the laying down, modification, and strengthening of nerve pathways in our body and brain. Some of these nerve pathways lie outside our brain in nerves of the body and spine. These need to be trained by physical training.

Many of the pathways lie within the brain. These pathways can be effectively trained by the use of mental techniques such as imagery and simulation.

Imagery

Imagery is the process by which you can create, modify or strengthen pathways important to the co-ordination of your muscles by training within your mind. Imagination is the driving force of imagery.

Imagery rests on the important principle that you can exercise these parts of your brain with inputs from your imagination rather than from your senses. The parts of the brain that you train with imagery experience imagined and real inputs with the real inputs being more vividly experienced.

You can also use imagery as a substitute for real practice to train the parts of your mind that it can reach. Imagery is useful training where:

• An athlete is injured and unable train in any other way
• The correct equipment is unavailable or practice is impossible for some other reason
• Where rapid practice is needed

Unleashing the Power of Imagery

The real power of imagery lies in a number of much more sophisticated points:

• Imagery allows you to practice and prepare for events and eventualities that can happen in reality. With practice it allows you to enter a situation you have never physically experienced with the feeling that you have been there before and achieve whatever you are trying to achieve.
• Imagery allows you to prepare and practice your response to physical and psychological problems that do not occur normally. If they occur, you can respond to them competently and confidently.
• Imagery can be used to train in sports psychology skills such as stress and distraction management.
• It allows you to pre-experience the achievement of goals. This helps to give you confidence that these goals can be achieved and allows you to increase your abilities.
• Practicing with imagery helps you to slow down complex skills so that you can isolate and feel the correct movements of the skills and isolate where problems in technique lie.

Imagery can also be used to affect some aspects of the involuntary responses of your body such as releases of adrenaline.

Simulation

Simulation is similar to imagery in that it seeks to improve the quality of training by teaching your brain to cope with circumstances that would be met at an important competition.

Simulation is carried out by making your physical training circumstances as similar as possible to the 'real thing'. For example, by bringing in crowds of spectators, by having performances judged, or by simulating a competition at a training session.

In many ways simulation is superior to imagery in training, as the stresses introduced are often more vivid because they exist in reality. However simulation requires much greater resources of time and effort to set up and implement and is less flexible.

You should therefore use simulation and imagery together for maximum effect.

"All For One And One For All"
Gordon Fong, Coach
Scarborough Fencing Club

If you have a subject that you would like covered or comments, please e-mail me at gord@scarboroughfencing.on.ca.