Mental practice is rehearsal of an activity without physical movement. Much of its application in recent times has been in sport. Examples include popular programs such as “Inner Golf” or “Inner Tennis.” However, you can also apply mental practice or rehearsal to other learning objectives.
You could imagine that, given its importance, researchers would be able to explain how and why mental practice works. Unfortunately they cannot. Recent research has cast doubts on three of the most popular theories, however these persist in various books and references. These theories are:
· The psychoneuromuscular theory. Mental practice stimulates the same muscular pathways as physical practice does.
· The cognitive learning theory. Mental practice helps set up counterpart mental nodes to physical nodes in the brain.
· The symbolic learning theory. Mental practice is a coding system for new skills.
Regardless of how it works, mental practice does improve task performance. Let’s look at some of the key findings.
Most reliable research literature shows that physical or real practice is still more effective than mental practice. For example, if you practiced twenty landings in an aircraft your performance would be better than if you practiced ten landings in the aircraft and ten landings mentally.
However, if you practiced twenty real landings, plus twenty mental landings, your performance would be statistically better than if you just did twenty real landings alone.
So why do mental practice? There are two key reasons. Firstly, combined mental and physical practice is usually more time and cost efficient. The second is that mental practice allows a wider range of training scenarios. For example, it can go places where real or physical practice is too dangerous or prohibitive. Let’s look at these points in more detail.
One instance or repetition of real or physical practice is better than one instance of mental practice. However, that one instance of real or physical practice usually takes more time, is more expensive or is more mentally taxing. This limits the number of iterations that you can do in a set time period or with a set budget.
Let’s look at an example that highlights this point. If you were training to land an aircraft, you can typically do a maximum of six to seven landings in an hour at a moderately busy airfield. In two hours, you could do say sixteen iterations.
Using combined mental practice, visualizing the landing phase may take say two minutes, which would enable you to do thirty repetitions in that one hour (with enough concentration).
Let’s compare two scenarios. On scenario involves the two hours of real practice. The second is one hour of real practice with a one-hour mental practice session. With the second scenario, you get a 230% increase in the number of repetitions, at half the cost. If you split that one hour mental practice session into six twelve-minute sessions over a week, you also improve repetition timing. This increases learning efficiency again.
The same principle applies in other activities. You can use visualization in golf to achieve far more rounds in the same time period. You can use visualization for more brain-based activities as well, such for as selling or negotiation training.
As well as being more efficient, mental practice can take you to places too dangerous or expensive to go to during real or physical practice. For example, you could use imagery to practice scenarios such as detecting and dealing with the symptoms of hypoxia, hyperventilation or carbon monoxide poisoning while flying an aircraft.
The same again applies in dangerous or risky activities. This may be getting out of a rally car quickly in an accident in various scenarios (rolled over, door jammed, and others). Another scenario might be reacting to a collision in a yacht race. More common examples may be visualizing a car coming through a red light towards you, or someone approaching you on the wrong side of the road. These examples may be visualizations you want to try now. What would you do?
These scenarios may be too dangerous to try in real training, however mental practice can help you perform correctly should the need arise.
There are two main periods when mental practice can help you. You can use mental practice to help improve how fast you learn a new skill or task. You can also use mental practice to refine or improve your performance of an already learned skill.
The general principles of visualization apply to mental practice. The main focus is on performing a series of steps. When starting out on a new task, it’s helpful to verbalize those steps, and use an external reference if necessary. As your competence increases, you should move to direct visualization without these cues.
Good mental practice includes:
· Vividness. Increase your vividness by recalling as many parts of the task as possible. Your vividness can increase as you do more real or physical practice. You become aware of the nuances and subtle cues present. Build these into your visualization.
· Controllability. Controllability refers to forming consistent images. You need to be able to repeat the visualization consistently and accurately. Again, using scripts and other external cues can help you achieve this in the early stages. Move away from these though as you move from learning to refining the skill (as you probably won’t have these when you perform the skill or task).
· Exactness of reference. The steps you follow in your visualization have to represent the correct performance of the task. Correct instruction first is important. If you practice the wrong images, you may perform the task wrongly in real or physical practice. Usually you need to have a minimum skill or task competence before mental practice is effective.
· Timing. The timing in your visualization should be similar to the timing of the real performance. Significantly slowing down or speeding up the visualization may introduce interference. An exception may be when there is a delay between the steps in a task. You can usually skip to the start of next step.
· Concentration. Being in Memletic State helps mental practice. Concentration is crucial though. Be mindful of concentration and distractions, and use the techniques described in the section on concentration to deal with distractions quickly.