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After focus, the world’s greatest athletes list visualization as the next most important aspect of their mental training. The importance of this is definitely a must! You have to see yourself being great. I can only speak from my experience, but visualization was huge for me in swimming and other sports that I participated in. (Yes, I was Middle School Champ in wrestling, too!)
In swimming, I would visualize over and over, and over and over again, just to do it absolutely perfect in my mind. I would know how I was going to start, how the stroke felt, how fast the turns were going be, when to breath, on and on until I touched the wall and saw the clock with my best time! Bedtime is the perfect time to practice this…What you can do is relax your body and start from the beginning of your race with how your body feels, the air, the sounds, what you hear and have the special event in your empty relaxed mind. You go through your pre-swim ritual in your head, the stretches, the breathing and the preparation of your event. You see yourself starting swimming and pulling through the water with 100% effort and efficiency….then you glance up at the wall and are extremely overjoyed by the numbers you see on the scoreboard. If you believe you can be the best you can be, if you can actually visualize yourself excelling at your sport and feel the power through your visualization techniques, your will be one mean, powerful and unstoppable athlete!
If you are just training hard that’s great, you will get benefit from that, but if we also add the focus component and visualization technique you will start becoming an even greater well-rounded and more complete athlete. The focus and the visualization probably are worth 50 – 60% of the entire picture, so don’t go on much longer without it. I don’t like giving people a 60% advantage over me doing something and I assume you don’t either! Practice this every night and you will start noticing a difference by mid November…..Let me know how it goes.
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