M2M Day 101: Deconstructing video and using visualization to prepare for success
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For February, my goal is to land a backflip.
Tomorrow, I’m going to my third backflip lesson. So, today, other than doing some light conditioning exercises, I focused mainly on my mental preparations.
This is especially important since my last lesson was mostly unsuccessful, and, as a result, a bit de-energizing.
To get my mind back into a positive and productive place, I spent most of tonight watching backflipping videos on YouTube, trying to internalize technique, and visualizing myself repeating the movements in my mental representation of the AcroSports gym.
While visualization can sometimes come across as pseudoscience, it’s actually something that’s genuinely effectively. In fact, professional athletes (perhaps, most famously, Michael Phelps) use visualization as a major part of their training routines.
For me, visualization helps me more easily relax and focus, once I’m in the real-life situation, since my brain has already pre-processed the activity/stimuli in productive ways. Visualization also helps me build confidence and positivity about whatever it is I’m visualizing.
In particular, tonight, to aid my visualization, I watched and rewatched (many times over) a video of my coach, Elijah, backflipping. His backflip is effortless and clean, and in my brain, I mentally edited myself into the video (in place of Elijah), executing the moves just as he does.
We’ll see how this helps me tomorrow.
Bonus video: While searching YouTube for backflip videos, I also came across a video where a complete beginner learns and lands a backflip in only 10 minutes. While this video is inspiring, it’s also quite practical — I can definitely borrow some of the ideas for my own progression.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
