Thursday, 6 October 2011

Visualizing

Visualizing has become a skill that a greater part of elite swimmers use it gives them an extra edge in the pool where they have seen the race in their mind and played over and over so when it comes around have a good idea of what the turn out of the race will be.


An amazing competitor to prove this skill works would be the great Micheal Phelps where we all watched him take 8 gold medals!!! Now that is no ordinary achievement you have to be doing something special to make something like that happen. He tell us in his book of such mental training sessions where just before he would go to sleep he would visualize races again and again, paying attention to the smallest detail to make it as lifelike as possible and communicate with the subconscious. So that when he got on the block it was almost second nature.

But don't be fooled to think that just because you have been visualizing you will swim fast, Micheal Phelps said that in between Sydney and Athens he only took about five days off and they were not holidays. So all those people that said ahhh look how talented he is that's all hard work maybe a little talent but mainly hard work. A famous golfer Gary Player puts it perfectly,"the more I practice the luckier yer I get."