Thompson at Large - author, journalist, blogger, and periodic talk radio host

Once you come up against what you believe to be your limits, success is more a matter of mind than muscle

“I never hit a shot,” Jack Nicklaus in Golf My Way, "not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head." For Lee Evans, four-hundred-meter Olympic champion and world-record holder, success in the 1968 Olympics involved visualizing every stride of the race, "searching out and correcting weaknesses in every step I took." Champion bronco and bull rider Larry Mahan tries to picture every ride in his mind before he gets on the bull, and "then I try to go by the picture." Body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger claims that when he has an image of a particular muscle while doing a pump, the benefit to that muscle is ten times that of one done when his mind is drifting. Quarterback Fran Tarkenton trained a few days before an important game by "running whole blocks of plays in my head ... trying to visualize every game situation, every defense they're going to throw at me."

What's going on here? Top-flight athletes daydreaming, fantasizing, spacing out? Not at all. These are athletes who have discovered, often quite accidentally, the validity of psychologist and champion body builder Charles Garfield's maxim for athletic success: Once the physical training is done, the difference between winning and not winning is in your head. Since the publication ten years ago of W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, in fact, more and more professional competitors and weekend jocks alike are entertaining the possibility that the mind is the playing field on which the real game takes place. There is a growing consensus that the next breakthroughs in athletic performance will come not so much from more muscle bulk and skeletal strength as from a skillful combination of physical training and the use of such largely neglected "powers of the mind" as concentration, meditation, visualization, and inner sensing.

The mental game actually goes back a long way. Concentration, willpower, and commitment have always been essential to athletic achievement. But because mental factors are not easily quantified, physical-education research has fashioned itself in the image of the hard sciences. Modern coaches and physical educators have emphasized the purely physical aspects of athletic performance, using methods and metaphors drawn from physics and physiology.

But if an athlete has been told how his movements could be improved, then what? "It doesn't do any good to tell an athlete his leg should be angled at thirty-six degrees instead of forty-two degrees," says Edwin Moses, reigning champion of the four-hundred-meter hurdle race. "What is he going to do with that?” Charles Dillman, head of the Department of Biomechanical and Computer Services in the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Division of Sports Medicine, answers that biomechanical approaches can pinpoint an athlete's weaknesses, but he agrees that the major problem
still is how to produce the desired change. "We haven't even begun," he states, "to understand what's going on in the mind and how it perceives hat the body can and can't do."

When the mental factor is added in, the inner game begins. The tame previously played exclusively
the gymnasium or on the grassy fields expands to include the field of consciousness.

"All games set up obstacles between the beginning and the goal," says Timothy Gallwey. "In the outer game of tennis, two or more players contend with time and the space on a court, with a net and with aspirations to strategically place a rubber all by use of implements known as rackets." In the inner game, Gallwey states, the obstacles are the many varieties of internal interference, such as doubt, distraction, outbursts of anger, forgetfulness.

In other words, change the focus, and change the game.

"Inner game" is actually too simplistic a phrase for the variety of mental states that can be tapped through sports. While any map of ' the human psyche is necessarily provisional, the following categories are offered to help articulate (and demystify) the mental realms of sports and fitness:

Cognitive strategies: “Athletes are basically a healthy group," says Bruce C. Ogilvie, sports psychologist, formerly of San Jose State University, "but the main interference in performance is self-doubt. " Cognitive strategies are those that directly address issues of self-doubt, motivation, drive, commitment, mental toughness, and mental flexibility.

An example of a simple cognitive strategy is the pilot study entitled The Rational Wrestler, by A. M. Horton Jr. and J. K. Shelton. Four male wrestlers thought to be performing below their potential participated in two group treatment sessions that focused on basic relaxation techniques, examining irrational beliefs, and group discussions. A comparison of records before and after treatment showed a 44 percent improvement in matches won.

Focusing/relaxatio: In the introduction to Zen in the Art of Archery, D. T. Suzuki speaks of the state of "purposeless tension" present when the archer "ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him." Top athletes describe this state in different ways. For Billie Jean King, it's a perfect combination of "violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquility." After breaking the world downhill-skiing record, Steve McKinney felt he had "discovered the middle path of stillness within speed, calmness within fear...."
Professional sports teams across the world are utilizing various mental practices to help improve their game. According to Charles Garfield, who specializes in helping athletes develop what he calls "peak performance, " Eastern bloc countries now have as many sports psychologists as coaches on their teams, and half as many physiologists as most Western teams. Soviet and East German coaches are also experimenting seriously with different techniques, including an approach called psychic self-regulation (PSR). This blend of yoga, hypnosis, meditation, and the martial arts helps athletes master breathing rhythms and muscle relaxation, achieve voluntary temperature changes in various parts of the body, and bring the heart rate under conscious control. Soviet researcher A. S. Romen has published studies suggesting that PSR techniques can increase the growth of muscle fiber.

Visualization/imaging: Visualization not only can be used to improve coordination, it can also help an athlete to concentrate. And more and more sports scientists, unwilling to settle for either unproved claims or unfounded doubts, are taking visualization into the laboratory—and getting results.

In the early 1960s sports psychologist W. I. Steel made a study of muscular endurance involving four groups of fourteen boys selected at random. The "physical practice" group performed bench presses each day consisting of four lifts and a sixty-second rest followed by more lifts. Another group combined physical practice (four lifts) with mental practice (five minutes of visualizing this task) daily.
Those who did physical practice alone gained 8.54 percent from initial to final performance scores, while the. boys who combined actual bench pressing with mental rehearsal scored a 12.66 improvement. On an overview of five separate studies relating mental practice to performance, researcher Alan Richardson found that "an alternation of physical practice and mental practice tends to produce the greatest improvement in performance."

Kinesthetic awareness: Tiny specialized nerve endings embedded in muscles, tendons, and joints, known as proprioceptors, are responsible for reading and reporting on the position of the body and its various movements. The capacity to read and act on these messages from the proprioceptors is what many coaches and players call kinesthetic awareness. If visualization involves forming a mental picture of how the ideal move would look, kinesthetic awareness involves creating an inner portrait of how it would feel.

"Visualization helps create the blueprint for moving into new 'body space, says bodybuilder Frank Zane, three-time winner of the Mr. Olympia title. "Acute sensory awareness teaches the body how to grow into this new space."

A growing body of scientific evidence supports Zane's thesis. A 1946 study of suggestion and hypnosis by M. B. Arnold was among the first to suggest what modern-day physiologists now take for granted: that if one imaginse throwing darts, the result is a small but measurable contraction of the muscles used in actually throwing darts. And in a 1932 study of the electrophysiology of mental activities, Edmund Jacobson found that using a combination of visual and kinesthetic imagery, as opposed to only visual, produced greater measurable muscle action during imagined weight lifting.

The far-out side: As the idea of the "inner game" becomes more familiar a growing number of athletes are reporting experiences that appear to be direct perceptions of bodily processes and structures not usually visible from the outside. In The Psychic Side of Sports, Michael Murphy and Rhea White relate several variations of this experience: A distance runner lay down in the grass after a particularly hard workout and was flooded with inner images of "red cells spurting from broken vessels with startling rapidity." A champion body builder says he heard his muscles growing in his sleep when he was in heavy training; the sound was like "cornflakes being poured into a bowl." Golfer Bobby Jones claims he often heard a melody on the golf course and that he would play his best game if he used the music to give rhythm to his swing.

Fact or fantasy? While Murphy and White offer no final conclusions, they suggest that such phenomena are more widespread than we think and are generally suppressed because of their strangeness. And they believe such capacities "cannot be suppressed completely, even in a culture generally blind to their existence. Cultivated wisely, they may lead us to a new evolutionary adventure."

And where is this adventure to start for the beginning athletic yogi? Try your local bookstore, one that stocks an ample variety of titles in sports, psychology, and spiritual practice. Golf in the Kingdom, Michael Murphy's semi-fictional account of a meeting with a mystical Scottish golf pro, is must reading. In The Ultimate Athlete George Leonard presents theory as well as practice in the mind-body approach to sports. And Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis and Mike Spino's Running Home offer mind-body training in those respective sports.

As you begin to join the inner game with the outer, learn to pay attention to your thoughts and feelings when you're engaged in your favorite sport, when you're sitting alone quietly, even when you're at a party. In the words of Henry James, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost." Practice being aware of even the most subtle sensations:. Can you feel your fingertips tingle as you wake in the morning? Set aside a daily period for meditation and visualization. Experiment with focusing your center of consciousness at different locations: in your head, your toes, your heart. Follow dream images. See where they lead.

And while there is no single perfect visualization exercise, here is a good one: Close your eyes and see yourself as a child again, bounding out the front door on a cool spring day. Imagine yourself taking a deep, full breath, seeing the sky, feeling the fresh, clean air race through your body, then jumping down the steps into the brand-new world of morning.

From here, imagine yourself playing your favorite sport—racquetball, say. Visualize the ball approaching in slow motion, allowing more than enough time to position yourself for your next swing. See yourself taking what is for you a perfect backhand; feel every inch of the stroke, every muscle in your body. Can you feel the subtle vibrations move up your hand and arm as the ball strikes the racket?

Finally, be patient with yourself; progress in inner sensing can't be forced. But be steadfast; improvement requires commitment. (Or, as legendary golf champion Ben Hogan once put it, "The more I practice, the luckier I get.") Relax, focus, take yourself lightly, be an explorer, and consider the words of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki-roshi: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

—Esquire, May 1984