UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, March 21,1997
5A
Victory or Voodoo?
Theories suggest that athletes can condition their minds and bodies without physical practice
fracting studies in an effort to connect visualization with brain-to-motor stimulation.
Continued from Page 1A
Theories suggest that the same impulses the brain sends to the muscles during actual play can be recreated by picturing the event in your mind.
Consequently, visualization should allow athletes to condition their minds and bodies for competition without biological waste.
their minds and bodies for compe
tition without physical practice.
Sport psychology studies seem to show that visualization does reinforce and condition muscular an
49 force and condition muscular and neural connections.
Competitive edge or smoke and mirrors?
In his doctoral dissertation, Scott Ward, KU graduate in sport psychology, said the use of imagery in sports was an effective addition to an athlete's training program. But
the exact function imagery plays in
biotics remains unclear.
"There are some studies that tend to point to the idea that visualization works," Templin said. "The difficulty is that there is no real proof. There are a lot of things in this world that work, but they can't be scientifically proven. And since 90 percent of the Olympic athletes
at Atlanta used visualization in "their training program, that should be some grounds that it works."
Betsy Klein, a psychologist who has worked with professional football players from the Kansas City Chiefs, has been told by a number of athletes that visualization
"A big problem arises when psychologists try to determine if visualization alone is responsible."
Klein said. "There could be many factors affecting the way an athlete performs."
increases their performance, but she questions whether it is the real performance enhancer.
"There is no adequately controlled, consistent evidence that visualization works," Holmes said. "I think my colleagues in psychology, especially sport psychology, aren't happy when I point these things out, but this visualization is all Mickey Mouse."
Balance of sport psychology on visualization, as well as the lack of scientific proof, have other psychology professionals asking whether visualization should be taught without proof of its effectiveness.
Dave Cook, former director of applied sport psychology at KU, strongly disagrees with Holmes.
Big-time clients
Cook resigned last year from the University to pursue big-time sports clients that were in search of mental training.
He now runs the Dallas-based sport psychology company Mental Advantage. His client list includes members of the National Basketball Association, National Football
"...this visualization is all Mickey Mouse."
David Holmes professor of psychology
League, Major League Baseball,
Professional Golfers Association
and world-champion track and
power-lifting teams.
"Visualization is one of the critical things that sport psychologists can teach athletes," Cook said. "It gives the athletes a mental and physical balance in competition. This sets up the athletes so they can form an
optimistic picture of the outcome of competition."
The San Antonio Spurs were looking for that optimistic approach when they hired Cook, said Greg Popovich, vice president of basketball operations for the team.
"The type of mental skills Cook teaches is being used by almost all professional teams," Popovich said. "We will use those skills to get our players to a higher level of play. Get out on the court and just practicing isn't enough."
Douglas Demney, director of KU psychology undergraduate studies, said that he was uncomfortable with using unproven psychological techniques and that sports psychology should pursue more rigorous testing of visualization.
He said visualization could be viewed as more of an art form than an exact science.
"Speculation and theory are helpful, but proof is what psychologists should work for," he said.
KU doctoral students who work
with KU coaches, athletes and outside clients in the sport psychology program say they stand behind the effectiveness of visualization.
They work with athletes as a team or on a one-to-one basis at the Peak Performance Clinic. At the clinic, started by Cook in 1990, athletes are taught visualization techniques and ways to incorporate them into all aspects of their sports.
Some widely used techniques include relaxing and imagining what it takes to be successful, the use of a key word to trigger positive visualization and self-recorded reinforcement audio tapes.
Relax and see the strike zone
"Visualization can be seen as the freeway between the mind and body," said Mike Norwood, sport psychology doctoral student. "It builds a muscle-memory reflex so that athletes can turn their visualization quickly and easily into actual performance."
"Visualization can be seen as the freeway between the mind and body."
Mike Norwood doctoral student
Josh Wingerd, a pitcher for the Kansas baseball team, had surgery
Norwood said mental reflex through visualization was a matter of survival at Division I colleges, where winning often comes down to a tenth of a second or the last foul shot.
to remove bone spurs from his throwing shoulder before coming to Kansas last year.
It only took a couple of bad games to shake his confidence to the point at which throwing strikes was one of the toughest things for him to do.
"There was no way I could throw a strike because in my mind, if I threw anything over the plate, they were going to hit it five miles," he said. "My confidence was shot."
Wingerd had never used visualization before going to the Peak Performance Clinic for assistance.
He worked with KU doctoral graduate Jeff Kress on using key words to trigger positive visualization during cames.
When Winged would begin to struggle in a game, he would remind himself of the key words "balance," "strike zone" and "speed."
Key words are supposed to put an athlete in a positive state of mind and increase focus on the task at hand.
But Wingerd uses visualization in a way not taught by sport psychologists. Instead of positive visualization, he imagines giving up home runs and base hits.
"I will visualize myself not doing so good with my pitchers to find out how that makes me feel. If you focus on success all the time, then you won't know how to move on after failure," he said. "When I started to visualize hits and homers, things really started clicking for me and getting better."
Beth Kane, assistant golf coach and Peak Performance Clinic facilitator, encourages the athletes with whom she works to use positive visualization.
"I want people to visualize what they are like when they are performing at an awesome level," she said. "They need to be thinking what would they want to be like on the most important shot or game of their life."
That shot came Oct. 7 in the form of a hole in one for Anne Clark, Salem, Ill. senior KU golfer.
"Preshot visualization might have helped me get off such a good shot, but when I found out that it was a hole in one, it actually shook my confidence," she said. "After that hole, I had to visualize myself doing good on the remaining holes to try and focus."
Sport psychologists are confident that advances in brain-monitoring science will help prove that visualization has an identifiable impact on athletic performance.
But until that scientific proof comes to light, sport psychologists will have to endure criticism from their peers.
"I will welcome visualization with open arms," said Holmes, the KU psychology professor. "But the only thing that will pry my arms open is proof that it works. Proof that all psychologists in the field of psychology should demand before it is put to use."
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