Unlike other mental constructs touted as harbingers for success in sports, visualization tends not to evoke the skeptical ire of rigorous observers. This asymmetry stems from the fact that as opposed to an attribute like resolve, the process of visualization is palpable and is something that can be repeated, isolated, and varied. It’s a skill — subject to improvement and degradation akin to any other.
The testimonials of cricketers in favor of this approach are abundant. For instance, when asked about the importance of this practice, Kohli was quoted as saying that “it is everything for me”, before adding, “When I am in the gym, when I am practicing, regularly there are visuals running in my head of me dominating that bowler”. Such statements and the basic scientific logic behind them were deliberated upon by Tim Wigmore in this excellent piece. However, the conceptual framework hitherto only recognizes visualization as a device that, to paraphrase Wigmore, allows players to maintain focus and not be frazzled by the opposition’s tactics. This limited scope of inquiry has led to the neglect of a burgeoning body of scientific literature that attests to some enhancement of actual sporting actions through visual mental training.
Much of the data pertaining to the efficacy of mental imagery is of an anecdotal sort; the technique’s efficacy hinges on the trust shown in it by athletes. While it is far from the cornerstone of this piece, it is still instructive to recognize just how pervasive the practice is: a study by Murphy et al. (1990) found that 90% of Olympic athletes used some form of visualization, with 97% of these accrediting it with playing a role in their success.
Foremost among the meta- analysis on this topic is this paper by Feltz and Landers(1983), who placidly deemed mental training to be “only somewhat better than no practice at all”. A decade later, though, Driskell et al. (1994) were showing more enthusiasm in their own meta-analysis declaring that, “mental practice has a positive and significant effect on performance”. This trend of accumulating confidence in the idea came to fruition with Weinberg et.al (2007) remarking that the evidence for this was “impressive and clearly [demonstrative of] the value of imagery in learning and performing motor skills.”
Perhaps the single most robust experiment on the topic — replete with a respectable sample size and a control group — comes from Robins et al. (2007). They found that the tennis players assigned to receive a combination of physical practice and mental imagery training improved their serving accuracy a lot more than the group assigned to physical training alone (who, somewhat surprisingly, didn’t show any improvement). This effect was also larger for those who came into the study with relatively better motor imagery ability. Corroboration of these findings came a year later when Weinberg et al.(2008) intervened with a package of mental training routines including visualization and established an improvement in every measured motor activity except hockey hit strokes.
One plausible mechanism for the efficacy of this process is that of functional equivalence, which is supposed to abet sports performance through mental rehearsal being an attenuated imitation of actual motor activities; such that actually imagining yourself facing a bowler is relatively similar to actually facing the bowler. In the domain of neuroscience, this notion has been supported by the research undertaken by John Decety (1996), who established that both imagining motor activities and actually performing those activities activated the same brain regions (specifically the prefrontal cortex and its link with the basal ganglia).
Further evidence for the similarity between imaginative and physical motor tasks comes from the works of Roger Shephard and Steve Kosslyn, who, across various experiments, have shown that the time taken to complete an imagined task scales linearly with the complexity of that task — as is the case in the real world. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that the processing speed, spatial relationships, and the neuronal underpinnings of imagined and actual activities are similar, which together furnish us with a convincing means by which repetitive visualization of sporting acts can enhance actual sports performance. As is ubiquitously the case in science, though, perspectives alternative to the one outlined above abound.
Lew Hardy, who describes himself as “interested in pretty much anything to do with high-level performance”, has postulated a model of motor imagery which is at odds with the functional equivalence theory. Far from being an imitation of actual practice, Hardy argues, motor imagery ought to deviate from physical iterations of motor movements so as to allow the athletes to incorporate elements that they are not exposed to in actual physical training. Specifically, he contended that athletes in sports wherein the nature of one’s own movement is paramount (e.g., gymnastics or diving) should envisage themselves from the third person perspective so as to become cognizant of any mishaps in their movements; information that they can’t gleam from physical training itself. Contrariwise, sports requiring a response to incoming stimuli (e.g. tennis, cricket, etc.) need to adopt a first-person perspective in order to better gauge the cues surrounding the incoming object. Expanding upon this framework, Robins et al. (2007) have asserted that the focus of novices during motor imagery tasks should be on their own movements (such as the mechanics of coming down on the golf or cricket ball), whereas the experts should concentrate on the target (where they want to hit the ball), since the latter have already mastered their mechanical movements. Both the specific approaches designed for the different levels of competency are presumably in contrast to the general focus in actual training.
Continuing on the theme of appropriate protocols, we now look at the appropriate time paradigm for motor imagery training, and how cricketers may have gone astray from the scientific consensus. Summarizing the relevant literature on his podcast, Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford, specifies: “You need to keep those visualizations quite brief, really in the order of 15 to 20 seconds, and not including elaborate motor sequences or steps”. Contrary to this prescription, Smith describes his mental routine as: “I am thinking of the bowler running in, where the gaps are, and how I am going to score my runs”. All pretty elaborate, none of it amenable to sparse repetition.
One interesting finding from 2013 hints at the particular sorts of sporting movements that lend themselves to this mental training routine. In it, the researchers designed a task wherein they had participants either inhibit or exhibit a motor response depending on the predesignated signals with which they were randomly prompted. The results of the study showed that those who were assigned to combine mental imagery with physical training did significantly better on the response inhibition task — they refrained from making a move when prompted not to. Perceptive cricket fans will immediately grasp how the inhibition of a motor action in response to a particular stimulus is akin to the batter having to leave deliveries when they deem it to be in the corridor of uncertainty; a fact which should allow the batters to optimize their visual training routines by perhaps giving preference to leaving the ball when partaking in the exercise.
As is implicit in the description of the previous findings, none of this should be taken as being an endorsement of repetitive mental imagery as a substitute for physical training — actual training would always eclipse any mental protocol — but the impact of mental imagery training is also not null; it is better than doing nothing. In a similar vein, Huberman cautions, “If you have- the option to do real-world training always go with real-world training. However, if you can add some mental training to your maximum level of physical training, you will get substantial benefits in terms of speed, accuracy, and consistency.”
