Canadian Kyokushinkai-kan Karate Organization - Kyokushin - The Power of the Imagination in Kyokushin Karate

The Power of the Imagination in Kyokushin Karate

By Shihan Don Corrigal

Introduction to Visualization and Simulation

Your body is a beautifully evolved sporting machine, comprising, among other things, muscles that can be trained to a peak of fitness and nerves that control the muscles. The nerves are massively linked in your brain: vast numbers of nerve cells are linked with a hugely greater number of interconnections. Part of the reason that human children take so long to reach maturity relative to animals is that we have many more nerve cells in our brain. Initially our brains are very disorganized. Much of the process of growing up, being educated, and becoming mentally mature is the process of organizing the vast chaos of the interconnectedness of the nerves in our brain into useful pathways.

Much of the process of learning and improving sporting reflexes and skills is the laying down, modification, and strengthening of nerve pathways in our body and brains. Some of these nerve pathways lie outside out brain in nerves of the body and spine. These need to be trained by physical training.

Many of the pathways, however, lie within the brain. These pathways can be effectively trained by the use of mental techniques such as imagery and simulation.

Visualization

Visualization is the process by which you can create, modify, or strengthen pathways important to the co-ordination of your muscles, by training purely within your mind. Imagination is the driving force of visualization. Visualization rests on the important principle that you can exercise these parts of your brain with inputs from your imagination rather that from your senses: the parts of the brain that you train with visualization experience imagined and real inputs similarly, with the real inputs being merely more vividly experienced.

So in its least effective form you can use visualization merely as a substitute for real practice to train the parts of your mind that it can reach. Even at this inferior level of use visualization is useful training where:

An athlete is injured, and cannot train in any other way;
The correct equipment is not available, or practice is not possible for some other reason;
Where rapid practice is needed. However just to use visualization for the reasons above is to undervalue its effectiveness grossly.

The real power of visualization lies in a number of much more sophisticated points:

Visualization allows you to practice and prepare for events and eventualities you can never expect to train for in reality. With practice it allows you to enter a situation you have never physically experienced with the feeling that you have been there before and achieved whatever you are trying to achieve.

Similarly visualization allows you to prepare and practice your response to physical and psychological problems that do not occur normally, so that if they occur, you can respond to them competently and confidently.

Visualization can be used to train in sports psychology skills such as stress and distraction management. It allows you to pre-experience the achievement of goals. This helps to give you confidence that these goals can be achieved, and so allows you to increase your abilities to levels you might not otherwise have reached.

Practicing with visualization helps you to slow down complex skills so that you can isolate and feel the correct component movements of the skills, and isolate where problems in technique lie.

Visualization can also be used to affect some aspects of the 'involuntary' responses of your body such as releases of adrenaline. This is most highly developed in Eastern mystics, who use visualization in a highly effective way to significantly reduce e.g. heart beat rate or oxygen consumption.

You can use visualization in a number of important ways:

To feel and practice moves and routines perfectly within your mind. This helps to program and strengthen the nerve pathways within the brain that control the correct execution of the skill - remember that your mind is the control centre of your body in performance.

To prepare for events that cannot be easily simulated for in practice. This gives you both the confidence to deal with these events as they arise, and the self-confidence that comes with preparation for any reasonable eventuality.

To experience achievement of a goal in your mind before you physically achieve it. This helps you to build the confidence that that goal can be achieved and expand your perceptions of the boundaries of your abilities.

To get a feeling of experience and 'having been there before' the first time you compete at a higher level.

To practice and program your mind when you cannot practice and program mind and body together:

When you are physically tired, or do not want to tire yourself before a performance;
When the correct equipment is not available;
When weather is too bad to train;
When injury stops normal training;
When you do not have the time to practice a particular skill physically.

To practice a particularly boring skill many times - concentrating your mind on imagery of the skill forces concentration on the skill.

To study your technique in your mind, either reducing complex movements to simple skills, or slowing the movements down to analyze them for faults in technique.

To relax - by imaging and enjoying a pleasant, quiet scene. This can be used most effectively in conjunction with biofeedback.

Visualization works best as a way of practicing and improving known skills, with known feelings and body positions. Whether or not it is an effective method or acquiring completely new skills is a matter of debate. You can significantly improve the quality of your training sessions by effective use of visualization. By performing the skill being practiced in your mind before you execute it, you can focus on all the important parts of the skill.

Visualizing of an activity before its execution has the following advantages:

It forces focus and concentration on execution of skills when otherwise you might just be tempted to go through the motions.

It allows you to slow down and analyze fine skills or complex techniques to form as perfect a model of the technique as possible.

It reminds you what to concentrate on to execute the skill perfectly.

It allows you to compare how the physical movement compared with the perfect image.

This helps you to detect faults in technique. Alternatively if the technique was better than the image, the image can be adjusted.

In addition visualization can be used in training to practice sports psychology skills. For example, you might imagine appearing before a large hostile crowd, and experience the stress and anxiety symptoms that you might expect. Within your mind you can practice the stress management skills that will be explained later. You might use visualization to practice pushing through pain barriers, or might practice keeping technique good when you imagine that your limbs feel exhausted. Alternatively you might use visualization to rehearse and perfect strategies that will be used during a real performance.

The following points will help with learning to use visualization effectively:

Visualization should be as Vivid as Possible

A strong and potent image will be more effective and 'real' than a weak one when it is presented to the appropriate nerve pathways in your brain.

Images can be made more real by:

Using all your senses in an image. Touch, sound, smell, taste and body position (kinaesthesia) should be combined with visual imagination to create highly 'real' images.

Observing detail of sensations such as the feeling of the your belt, the texture of your gi, the smell of sweat, the feeling and flow of a kick or punch, the sound of a large crowd, or the size and shape of a stadium in which you will compete. These can be observed in detail in reality, and then incorporated into visualization later to make it more vivid.

Visualizing yourself within your body feeling and sensing all going on around you rather than looking on at yourself from a remote position. If you visualize yourself within yourself, then the image is more connected, realistic, and involved than a remote view.

As with most sports psychology techniques, it is often best to start gently so that the basic skills can be fully learned in a low stress environment. This means that you can be more confident of the effectiveness of these skills when you need to put them to the test. Initially start using only 5 minutes of imagery a day, perhaps when you have just got into bed, or when you wake up in the morning.

The number of minutes can be expanded as time goes on:

Typically many champions will do 15 minutes/day, although this may go as high as 1 hour/day just before a major competition.

Similarly, start using imagery in a quiet, relaxed environment in which there are few distractions.

Slowly experiment with using it in increasingly disturbed situations until you are comfortable with using imagery in the most distracting environments such as high-level events. It is important too to use imagery systematically: get into the habit of practicing techniques in your mind before executing the in practice, and of using stress management imagery routinely. A habitual routine use of imagery will bring its benefits almost automatically when you are under stress.

Simulation

Simulation is similar to imagery in that it seeks to improve the quality of training by teaching your brain to cope with circumstances that would not be otherwise met until an important competition was reached. Simulation, however, is carried out by making the your physical training circumstances as similar as possible to the 'real thing' - for example by bringing in crowds of spectators, by having performances judged, or by inviting press to a training session. In many ways simulation is superior to imagery in training, as the stresses introduced are often more vivid because they exist in reality. However simulation requires much greater resources of time and effort to set up and implement, and necessarily is less flexible in terms of the range of eventualities that can be practiced for. You should therefore use simulation and imagery together for maximum effect.

Simulation seeks to make your training environment as similar to the competition environment as possible. While imagery relies on use of imagination, simulation relies on manipulation of the training environment by actually recreating the stresses under which you will perform. Effectively, you can consider normal training only to train muscles and nerve pathways directly involved in the control of muscles. Imagery is a good way of training these nerve pathways in the brain, as well as those related to performance and sports psychology. It does not train muscles and body nerves nearly as effectively.

Simulation, however, seeks to train all parts of your brain and body by helping you to physically perform the skills being trained under a physical environment that recreates all the stresses and distractions of competition. This helps you to develop the mental skills that stop you 'choking under pressure' - stress management, distraction management, goal focus and imagery. It enables you to actually feel that you have been in a novel situation before. Military training uses simulation in exactly the same way to teach soldiers to handle the intense psychological stresses of combat.

You can try introducing the following stresses into a training session to make a practice as realisitic as possible:

Noise: Loud noises can be played such as the sound of a large crowd at a football match;

Spectators: Spectators can be allowed in to view a training session. The more well known you are, the more people will turn up to watch training;

Referees: Referees and judges can be invited along to criticize and score your performance;

Bad Refereeing Decisions: Bad or biased refereeing decisions can be made to train you to focus on performance, not outcome goals. This should be used relatively rarely;

Cameras: Television cameras, flash photographers and press can be brought into the training session;

Arena: If possible training should occur on the course or in the arena where competition will take place;

Weather: Every opportunity should be taken to train in the worst weather conditions possible for competition;

Fatigue: Push yourself to perform effectively when tired, so that you can learn how to keep concentration on good technique when your resources are low;

Training when you have just eaten: This helps you to cope with the consequences of having to perform effectively unexpectedly.

If you simulate conditions that are much worse than the real conditions under which you will perform, then you will have the following advantages:

Confidence that you can handle anything thrown at you;

Well-practiced skills to handle the stresses and distractions of performance;

Confidence in your stamina and ability to keep technique good even under poor physical conditions such as tiredness, bad weather, poor equipment etc.;

You can also use simulation, in the form of role-play to handle non-sporting stresses associated with performance, such as press interviews, etc. While only top athletes may have the resources to use all aspects of simulation in their training sessions, you should be able to use some aspects effectively to help you prepare to give maximum performance under difficult physical and psychological conditions.

Visualization and simulation can be used effectively in improving technique, particularly when used in conjunction with close study of the technique of high-level performers in your sport. By selecting athletes whose performance you admire in a particular exercise, and either watching or videoing them executing technique, you can build see how they execute every stage of a skill. Using a video recorder you can slow the action down so that the components of the skill can be isolated. Once you have done this you can practice these components of the skill being observed, and an build them up into a complex action or a good image of the skill as it should be executed. Alternatively you can video your execution of a skill, and compare your technique as it is with how it should be or how better performers carry it out.

Summary of Visualization and Simulation

Your body is a sophisticated system powered by muscles and controlled by nerves, most of which are in the brain. The nerve pathways in your brain that are most important in sport are trained by presenting them either with real stimuli or, almost as effectively, with vividly visualized images.

Visualization is the process of using your imagination to create these vivid images, which train the important m ental pathways in your mind. At its most menial level, visualization can be used to practice this 'body control center' when no other method of practice is available. At a more sophisticated level you can use it to enhance your self-confidence, to prepare for eventualities that cannot be simulated in reality, to practice other sports psychology skills, to practice and improve technique, and to focus before a skill is executed.

Simulation is similar to visualization in that it is used to present nerve pathways in your brain with experiences that train them. In the case of simulation, however, the stimuli come through your senses, not from your imagination. Simulation works by making your training sessions as close to the final performance as possible by introducing spectators, judges, distractions, and stress inducers so that you can learn to deal with them. Simulation trains not only the nerves in your brain, but also those in the rest of your body as you physically perform the skills being trained.

Visualization and simulation can be used together at the same time to create an intensely realistic pre-experience of an important competition or event. This gives you the feeling of having been there before, with the confidence and competence that comes with it.