Help for coaches

New article on mental preparation. Our specialist Anthony Vone explains how mental images can help your players and help you improve games performance. Find out what this tool can bring and how to use it effectively.

How mental images works in football

The human brain cannot make the difference between an experience carried out and an imagined experience!

When you repeat 200 times the same technical gesture in your head, your brain believes that it has just made 200 real repetitions. This leaves an imprint in the brain and when performing this gesture in a real competition, it should be easier and more fluid. The chances are better than what happens automatically and more easily.

This tool validated by studies on neuroscience is increasingly present in high -level sport.

But this tool can be largely used in the amateur world and is perfectly suitable for football.

Mental images allow it

• Better learning of a gesture (precision gain)
• An increase in the level of performance by improving gestural coordination.
• Influence the motivation in a favorable sense.
• To better control competitive stress and promotes vigilance regulation.
• Not to lose all the benefits of training in case of parking following injuries: the footballer maintains his motor skills mentally representing the actions he has already carried out.

Vincent Kompany: «Wounded, looking at the games, I imagined how to counter this or that striker, what goes.

Concretely how to use this tool?

It is recommended to be accompanied by a mental coach to start learning well. But only we will also be able to derive benefits.

Let’s take the example of a penalty, which can be seen as an art, a technical gesture during which several elements must be taken into consideration (the score of the game, the moment, the external pressure, etc.).

Several steps are respected:

1st passage ->

Put yourself in a calm and relaxed environment for a few minutes, reforating the breath by closing the eyes

2nd step ->

Realism is essential during mental images. Imagine all the details, the most faithfully possible, as if I were really there (take the ball in your hands, put it on the penalty, take our momentum, breathing, listen to the whistle, the noise around, …). Try to hear the smells present, see the different colors around you, feel the feeling of your shirt, your cramps or the protections of the tibies, the feeling of your steps on the ground, the noises that surround you as the encouragement of the crowd, the taste of sweat on the lips, etc. In the imaging session, use the most sensory skills possible (vision, smell, hearing, touch) to maximize experience.

3rd step ->

Only positive in your head. It is essential to always imagine you in a positive situation. Imaging is in a certain sense the evidence of what we want to do during our game. As soon as there is a negative in your imaging session, he got up to check your thoughts and immediately return to positive images. If necessary, open your eyes for a moment to allow you to start again positive later. In short, during your imaging sessions, let yourself be won, to be successful, to score! Your images in your head should only be positive, success.

4th passage ->

During your view, you have two different ways to see you, or in the third person (sitting in the stands I see myself drawing my penalty) and in the first person (I see myself from inside me). Once again, this is a question preferably, but I suggest you both try to choose the most suitable for you.

5th passage ->

One last thing to improve your imaging sessions could be to keep a football ball, to be in full clothing.

We can well imagine an expert situation that was unfavorable by transforming the elements to make it favorable.

It will obviously be important to focus this mental imaging work on realistic situations that you can control.

The management of combining physical and mental practice will allow a performance gain.