Ep. #642: Mind Over Matter? The Science of Active Imagery for More Strength

Skull friend, it is I, Mike Matthews. Welcome to Muscle For Life. Now, can you guess what happens tonight at midnight? No, not the first wins of the FBO Winter. Not the release of my new skinny Geal. T hashtag wallet cleanse, hashtag moon balance hashtag Join the cult. And no, not first contact either.

Although this is still 2020, so you know, maybe when the witching hour arrives, what I know will happen is the end of the big book. Bonanza for the new second edition of my book for experienced weightlifters beyond bigger, leaner, stronger. And that means that this is your last chance to win over $6,000 in glorious gifts, including a 30 minute zoom.

Call with wa, a Vitamix blender, a whoop fitness tracker, a $200 Lule gift card, a month of Legion v i p coaching and ins, or weightlifting belt, and much more. And all you have to. For a chance to win is head over to BBLs book.com and buy a copy of BLS 2.0 any format, and then forward the receipt email. You get to [email protected].

Launch at L E G I N supplements.com and you’re in. You are entered in the giveaway. You have to act fast though because the book Launch Bonanza ends tonight and tomorrow we will be choosing the. Let’s say you want to get better at a physical activity like shooting of basketball. What should you do?

Practice. Of course you know that, but did you know that you can further improve your skills and get better faster by also just. Picturing yourself making baskets, and I know that might sound like hocus pocus, but mental practice has been an area of scientific interest for a couple of decades now. In the literature it’s referred to as active imagery and research, going back to 1994, has shown that visualizing yourself doing something can improve your.

To do it. Now, the exact mechanisms of how this works aren’t fully understood yet, but we do know that picturing yourself performing a task can elicit similar brain activity as actually doing it. And that is significant because the muscle memory that many people speak of in motor learning goes much deeper than.

The muscles studies suggest that the more often you perform actions, the more often certain areas of the brain are activated, and that plays a major role in actually learning to do whatever it is that you are trying to do and then being able to preserve that skill. Now, what type of mental picturing works best, though?

How do you make mental practice effective, and what does any of this have to do? Weightlifting. As scientists and athletes became more aware of the value of active imagery, they started asking questions. They wanted to know which techniques worked, which didn’t, which worked better than others, and how could they get the absolute most out of mental preparation and mental.

Practice. And this led to a model that is now considered the gold standard for active imagery. And it can be summarized in an acronym in a mnemonic, P E T L E P. I’ll just refer to it as PET le going forward. And it stands for Physical Environment Task Timing Learning. Emotion and perspective. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Let’s start at the top, of course, with physical, and this is the most important component of the model, and it entails replicating the physical elements of actual practice as much as possible and seeing and feeling the images as. Experiences. So for example, if you want to rehearse in your mind a tennis stroke or maybe a squat or a deadlift, you can increase the physicality of your imagery by focusing on how your body moves and feels with each repetition.

So with each stroke of the racket, or each rep of the squat or deadlift, then you can also include. In your imagery, sensory information, like the things you would see and the sounds you would hear, and the smells that you would smell. Researchers have even found that picturing yourself wearing the same clothes as when you play or perform can help and standing in the same stance.

This is more applicable to sports, of course, but it is applicable to weightlifting especially the squat and the deadlift, and also even holding. The racket or the barbell or the dumbbell in the exact way that you would if you were in the gym or if you were actually playing the sport or doing the activity that you are imagining.

All of those details make this more effective. Okay. Let’s move on to environment, and this is important because where. You perform your imagery matters. Scientists have found that the best results occurred when mental practice was done in an environment as close to the performance environment as possible.

They did some of their most effective imagery experiments in the actual competitive arenas themselves. Another good example of this is a creative study that was conduct. Golfers that had one group stand in golf shoes in a tray of sand and mentally rehearse hitting bunker shots. And after six weeks, scientists found that active imagery was as effective at improving their bunker play as actual physical practice.

That’s wild. And I know that’s a bit impractical for. Most of us, although if you have kids, you probably have a sandbox in the backyard. I do. So some of us would have options, but in the case of other activities and other circumstances, it’s not going to be feasible to do your mental practice where you actually do the thing.

And that’s okay. There are. Other alternatives as well that can just make the process more effective. For example, using video and audio to help replicate the environment can help increase the effectiveness of the imagery. So in the case of working out, I would, for example, go down to my home gym, which is not a full home gym.

I have. A set of dumbbells. I have some bands. I have a bike in there, and my wife has a Pilates reformer. That’s it. But hey, it’s more of a gym than my living room. And I could put on some music that I might normally listen to when I’m working out. And if I were to do just that and then do my mental practice there of let’s say the squatter, deadlift, or some other lift, could be an overhead press, some of the more difficult lifts.

I’m not sure I would do this for biceps curls, but. If you are really into this stuff and you like self experimentation, then you may do that. You may run through abbreviated versions of your actual workouts. All right, let’s move on to the next element of this model, which is T Task. And this one refers to the content of the imagery being specific to the skill and the focus level.

Whatever it is that you’re doing. So if you are trying to learn simple tasks, for example, if you have yet to master something simple, don’t imagine yourself performing complex tasks. Focus on where you’re at and what you are doing and trying to achieve. The next T refers to timing, which is the speed. Of the imagery, and this one is a crucial aspect of many sports.

So the general recommendation is to run your imagination at real time speed. So imagine yourself doing it at exactly the same rate as you would in the real world. That said, research shows that slow motion imagery does have uses, for example, it is particularly effective for. Developing a skill for correcting faults and for refining technique because it allows you to really focus on each little part of the larger movements.

And I can attest to the effectiveness and the usefulness of this in particular firsthand because when I was picking up golf and learning how to swing the club properly, it took a lot of work for me to really be able to produce, in my mind’s eye the kinesthetic. Feeling of what I was going for in the swing.

And there were many instances where I really had to stop and work through it in my mind in slow motion, what I was trying to get each part of my body to do, and in what sequence and at what speed. And what I found is once I figured it out with active imagery, once I could consistently produce. Feeling and the visual in my mind of what I was trying to do.

Once I knew what was right in my mind, only then was I able to consistently produce it in the real world. Up until then, I could swing the club 10 times and half of the swings might be okay, and half of them might have major technical flaws, and I didn’t have any. Clear idea of what was right and what was wrong, until I would actually go look at the camera footage and I went on like that for some time because again, it was just difficult.

The golf swing is a very complex movement. I remember one study I came across that ranked the top three. Difficult athletic movements as hitting a fastball. That was number one. And swinging a golf club, that was number two, and pole vaulting was number three. So for anyone who thinks that golf is not a real sport, I do understand it doesn’t require the raw athleticism that we generally associate with.

Athletes, but it requires a lot of technical skill. It is a very difficult sport to get good at. And so if there are any golfers out there listening, I highly recommend that you put the information I am sharing in this podcast into use. It helped me a lot and it will probably help you. And the same thing would go for any athletes listening.

Anybody who plays any sport recreationally. Professionally, if you are not doing mental practice, you are missing out on some pretty easy gains. You don’t have to spend too much time with this stuff to make a noticeable difference in your ability to perform. All right, moving on to the next point. In this model L, which is learning, and this refers to how the.

Changes as your skill improves. And the key here is the substance of your active imagery should change as you get better. So what and what you hear, smell, think, feel. You want that to replicate real life right now. As closely as possible. So as you become better at whatever it is that you are imagining, and you become more perceptive, you become more attuned to the actions in real life, you have to also do the same in your imagery because without such updating the effectiveness of the visualization declines.

Okay, E emotion. And this one refers to how emotional your imagery is, how emotion laden your imagery is. And the more emotion you inject into this, the more effective it’s going to be. And not just any emotions. You want realistic emotions, you want the emotions that you would expect to feel while actually doing the thing.

And interesting little note, it was hypothesized that overriding. Realistic emotions with, let’s say relaxation instead or calmness or serenity would produce superior results, but it didn’t pan out. In research, what seems to be most effective is to try to feel exactly the way you would feel when you’re doing it.

So if that is fired up, you want to feel fired up in your active imagery, if that is nervous as well. You want to try to recreate that, and similarly, as time goes on, If as you do the thing more and more, you go from being nervous beforehand or maybe during it to, let’s say, feeling confident. You’d wanna make sure that your imagery gets updated accordingly in the beginning.

The footage in your mind should include the feeling of nervousness to the degree that you would normally feel it. There’s no reason to turn the volume up all the way if that’s not how it is when you actually do it. But then in time, your imagery. Include the feeling of confidence, not nervousness. Okay.

And last here we have P perspective. And this refers to the actual viewpoint of the imagery. So should you be viewing from inside your head now your eyeballs, like first person or from an external position? A third person. Position and most experts recommend first person because it most mimics the actual performance conditions.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m in the gym squatting, I’m looking through my eyeballs for some form-based skills. Though like gymnastics, an external perspective has been shown to be beneficial. And I remember reading about a golfer, I don’t remember who. Who was asked about how he goes about correcting faults in his swing.

This was a professional golfer, and he said, Oh, it’s simple. What I do is I just go outta my head and I look at my setup. I look what I’m doing. I swing in the club and I. Find the fault and I fix it, and he was talking about in real time, which is interesting. Anyways, as far as perspective goes, individual preferences do matter here as well.

If you find first person imagination very difficult, or if you just like third person more and you seem to get better results with it, then you can just stick with that. You don’t have to do. Type of perspective over another if one just does not work for you.

If you are liking this episode, you should know that it is one of the chapters of the new second edition of my best selling book for experienced Weightlifters Beyond Bigger, Lean, Stronger, which is. [email protected]. Also, you should know that to celebrate this momentous occasion, I am giving away over $6,000 of glorious goodies, including a 30 minute zoom call with yours unruly, A Vitamix blender, a whoop fitness tracker, a $200.

Lululemon gift card, one month of Legion v i p coaching in insur, weightlifting belt, and much more. And all you have to do for a chance to win is head over to BBLs book.com. Buy a copy of the book any format, and forward the receipt email to [email protected]. And voila, you are entered in the giveaway.

You have to act fast though because the book Launch Bonanza ends tonight and tomorrow we will be choosing the winner. Okay, so that’s a broad overview of the model and it is a lot of theory to digest. So if you are feeling a little bit topsy-turvy, I understand we will get to some very specific examples as they relate to weightlifting.

But before we do that, let’s talk about that. Can you think yourself stronger? The research shows, the research that we have discussed so far shows that we certainly can improve our athletic skills with our imaginations, but can. Improve our strength, and the answer is absolutely. For example, in one study that was conducted by scientists at the University of Texas at San Antonio, young untrained individuals improved their biceps strength by using active imagery techniques to imagine flexing their biceps as they would.

Biceps curl. So for example, some of the participants mentally urged the elbow flexer muscles to contract maximally, whereas others visualized putting the forearm under a heavy table and then trying to lift the table. And that’s all they did. They did mental workouts and after six weeks of 15 minutes, just 15 minutes of imagery per day, so we’re talking about eight hours of total practice.

Active imagery alone increased their biceps strength by about. Percent, and I know these were non exercising folk, so we can’t assume that it would work equally well in those of us who are well trained in another study, more relevant to us weightlifters scientists at the University of Lyon or Lial, if you want to pretend you speak French.

Recruited college athletes to a workout program, comprising the leg press and bench press, and then split them into two groups. Group one used active imagery techniques to imagine performing sets while resting in their workouts. In group two did not use the active imagery techniques while resting. They just rested.

And after four weeks, what the scientists found is the active imagery group gained more strength in the leg press, but not the bench press. Interesting. Why? Why the disparity? The researchers offered. Few explanations, but the most plausible was that the leg press is easier to learn and it’s more comfortable for most people.

And that’s relevant because although these were athletes, they were not weightlifters. So it’s likely that these people were more confident pushing a heavy sled with their legs than they were holding a heavy barbell over their throat. And of course there’s the technical component of the activity involved as well.

The barbell bench press is not a difficult exercise per se, but it is definitely more technically demanding than the leg press. And so it might have been interesting in this case to see if active imagery would’ve helped more in the bench press if the study would’ve gone on for longer. Anyway. Another great example of the effects of active imagery on working out is a study conducted by scientists at Bishop’s University with 30 male university athletes, including football, basketball, and rugby players.

And in this study, the men were randomly assigned into one of three groups. Group one used active imagery to strengthen their. Flexor muscles. Group two used weight machines to exercise to train their hip flexors and group three did neither. They did no mental or physical training. After two weeks, the group using the weight machines increased their strength by 28%, and the group doing just mental practice increased theirs by 20.

4% we’re talking about college football players and basketball players and rugby players in people like that. Just thinking about training was about as effective at improving strength in the hip flexer muscles as actually training. How can we use all of this information to improve our weightlifting?

Let’s break it down. So one, I would recommend that you do active imagery when you’re in the gym. Yes, you can do it elsewhere, but this is the easiest way to fulfill the physical. And the environmental criteria of the pet lip model. And it’s perfect. You’re there. You are wearing your workout clothes, you work out shoes.

You are in the environment where you perform the activity. You are listening to your workout music, feeling the feelings of working out. And a very easy time to do your mental sets is in between your physical sets while you’re resting. And I have found this helpful on the big compound lifts when weights are heavy.

I’m not likely to do this if I’m finishing that workout with some rear raises, some rear flies or something like that. But if I have 95% of my one RM on the bar and I’m going for an AM wrap set, which is something that is included in the BBLs 2.0 programming, by the way, then yeah, I will envision the set and I’m going to feel myself doing it each rep, and I’m going to also feel myself.

Achieving my rep target. So it is an am wrap set, but I’m gonna go into it with a rep target that would indicate I have gained strength in this training phase, and I’d be doing the AM rep at the end of the training phase. So let’s say that’s five reps. That’s what I’m going to envision in my mind. I’m gonna see myself and f.

Feel myself getting each rep, and again, I’ve done this many times and if nothing else, it has definitely increased my confidence in actually being able to execute. And I haven’t done a proper scientific study on it, so I can’t say conclusively how much of a difference it has or has not made. But I can just say subjectively, it feels like it.

Made it easier to hit my rep targets. I feel like I have hit more rep targets when I’ve done this than when I’ve not done it. And again, if all it has done is just make me feel a little bit more confident as I’m stepping under the bar or getting under the bar in the case of the bench press, then it’s worth it.

It only takes a couple of minutes and I’m just sitting around anyway. Okay. Another point of application here is use vivid. This is very important for mental practice to be effective. It needs to be as lifelike as possible. You cannot slack on the details. You have to put some effort into it. It takes some mental effort and some focus and concentration.

It’s similar to information work in that regard. So let’s say that you are going to rehearse your squat and it’s gonna be in the first person. Then what you want to do is you wanna see the whole process. You wanna see yourself getting under the bar in your gym. Back taking in your breath, dropping, rising, and doing that for each rep.

And you also wanna make sure that you’re feeling your body move and you’re feeling strain in your muscles. You’re feeling yourself struggle against the load. You should feel the bar on your back. You should feel the weight on your knees and on your hips, and you should feel. Shift and you should feel your quads driving you out of the hole and so forth.

You should also make sure that you feel the emotion. So for me, that would be determined as I am stepping up to the bar and focused and then distressed as I’m getting deeper into a set and my quads are on fire, and then relieved and satisfied when I’m racking the weight having successfully hit. Rep target and to facilitate this, you can take a video or two of you actually doing the exercises you want to mentally practice so you have a very clear picture of what you look like when you’re doing them.

Another point worth noting is make sure that you make mental gains, because to get the most out of active imagery, you want to not only picture yourself performing an exercise, but improving on the exercise. You wanna make sure you imagine how it will feel to lift a weight that is slightly heavier than what you’re using now, because that’s always the goal, right?

We want to get a little bit stronger in our training, so we don’t want to envision ourselves squatting 600 pounds. If we are currently squatting 300 pounds, that would not be very useful. But what about 305 pounds? Can we see the extra two and a half pound plates on the bar? And can we go through the whole process with a slightly heavier weight?

And this isn’t gonna psych you out. Again, going too heavy in your mind is not gonna help. But by. Using just a little bit more weight, we can condition ourselves to make it easier to push and set prs. In essence, what we’re doing is we’re using our imagination to expand our comfort zone a little bit and to feel confident underneath a slightly heavier.

Barbell. And so what that means is we should always be a little bit ahead of where we are currently in our lifting when we are using active imagery. And then once we achieve, let’s say 305 for a squat, then our imagery should be three 10 and so on. And this, by the way, is actually how the Bishop’s University study worked.

They didn’t just have the athletes rehearse mentally the exercise with the same weight every time. The weight did get heavier in five pound increments, which of course mirrors how we train. We increase weights by five to 10 pounds. So the point here is, You don’t just go through the motions. You have to see yourself getting stronger.

You have to see yourself getting fitter and faster and facing greater and greater challenges and emerging victorious. The point is we want to drill our mind to expect progress and our body. We’ll follow. And again, an easy way to apply this to weightlifting is the example I shared hitting your rep target with your target weight.

And when you are doing your active imagery, seeing and feeling each rep, don’t rush it. Really just go through the successful set in your mind. And then go do it. All right. Another point here specifically related to using all of this for weightlifting is perspective. So is first person better or third?

Now, I mentioned that most research suggests that you will do best with a first person perspective, but remember, preference can change this, and especially when we’re talking about more difficult exercises that actually do require a fair amount of technical skill, like the squat. Deadlift and the overhead press, those are probably the best three candidates.

So I would say try both perspectives when you are rehearsing those exercises mentally, and just go with the one that seems to fit you best. Go with the one that just appeals to you most. Another point here is speed. So should you be visualizing fast, slow, real. Exactly the same speed that you would be lifting in the gym.

And I would say that if you’re new to a lift or if you are still working on your form or working bugs out of your form, then you can use the slow motion technique and that can be very helpful. You don’t have to. But if you are struggling with a certain portion of the movement, for example, you can slow that down and really focus on the minute details of that part of the exercise.

And lastly, updating your imagery as you improve doesn’t just mean adding more weight to the imaginary bar or dumbbell. It also has to do with. What parts of the exercise you are most aware of and what you are focusing on. Because as you get better, certain aspects of the movements just become ingrained habits.

They really just work on autopilot. Eventually, if you’re not there yet, you will learn to maintain a neutral spine in your deadlift no matter what. You won’t have to think about it anymore, and you will hit depth in your squat without thinking about it. You will keep your elbows tucked on your bench press and so forth, and your.

Should reflect this, and that just means that you should be focusing on the details that are most relevant to where you are. And your imagery should also evolve alongside your physical awareness and your abilities. So as you get stronger, Your active imagery should probably shift from the fundamentals of good technique, which eventually just become ingrained.

You don’t even have to think about them anymore. Two things like your tempo, for instance, which can make a big difference when the weights are heavy and you are really pushing yourself, Maybe you’re going for a pr. The right tempo can be the difference between hitting the PR and missing it by a rep, for example.

Also, you could think about finer points of your form. So maybe like when you are going to push your hips forward when you’re squatting, or exactly how you are going to manipulate the bar path when you’re benching. You can also focus on weightlifting cues. Those can be very helpful once you have more or less mastered the form.

Of course, there is always more work that can be done on form, but there is a point where you reach diminishing returns. Form is good enough for there to be little bottom line improvement left. So for example, let’s say your form is 80% as good as it will ever be. If you were to work hard, and it would take a lot of work to realize that final 20%, it may take more time to do that than it did to acquire the 80%, but let’s say you did that.

You might be surprised at how little of a difference it makes in terms of actual strength. Going from 60 to 80% is going to make a much bigger difference than going from 80 to 100%, for example. And so coming back to weightlifting queues, these tools can be very useful once you have achieved, let’s say, 80% proficiency, you’ve gotten about as good at the exercise as you are ever going to get.

Then when you are doing the exercise and when you are. Cursing the exercise, you can start focusing more on cues which come down to feelings. Usually whole body feelings, but sometimes very specific parts of the body, feeling and moving a certain way, and it can help you maintain good form and therefore perform better.

In your workouts, and if you wanna learn more about that, there is an article on weightlifting queues [email protected]. If you search for queues, it will come up and I have a podcast on it as well. So if you just search my podcast feed with whatever app you are using, wherever you are listening for queues.

It was posted a couple of months ago, so you can listen to that as well if you prefer to listen to it instead of read. Okay. Before we wrap up, a couple of interesting odds and ends. One is, research has found similar phenomena to active imagery with observing movements. So it would appear that you can improve your physical capabilities by watching.

Other people do things and there’s no reason to assume that it would work differently for weightlifting. And if you want to try that, I would recommend finding footage of someone who is physically similar to you, who has a physical structure similar to yours, because that will theoretically help groove in the best movement patterns for your.

And another useful way to profit from all of this is to use active imagery to help maintain strength. So if you can’t train for an extended period of time because of injury or life circumstances, or I don’t know, global pandemics research shows that you can use active imagery to help preserve your St.

So in a four week study that was conducted by scientists at Ohio University, the researchers randomly divided 44 people into three groups. They had group one put their non-dominant wrist in a cast to immobilize and weaken their forearm muscles. And then group two had their non-dominant wrist put in a cast just like group number one, but used active imagery techniques and group.

Didn’t get a cast, and they served as the control group. And the people in group two, the active imagery group, they practiced it by sitting alone in a quiet room. And they were just imagining contracting their cast bound forearms as hard as possible. And they did it five times per week. And. In 15 minute sessions, and in those sessions, they did four sets of 13 imaginary maximal contractions with one minute of rest between each set.

Now the researchers measured everyone’s forearms strength and the strength of the electrical impulses from the brain to the forearms, which is known as voluntary activation before, immediately after, and one week after the study. And what the scientists found is, Four weeks, group one’s forearm strength and voluntary activation declined by 45% and 23% on average compared to the control group.

So that was the nonactive imagery group. Group two, however, had very different results in the active imagery. Group. The forearm strength and voluntary activation declined by just 24 and 13% on average compared to the control group. That’s pretty significant. The group that did no active imagery lost about twice the strength and voluntary activation in the group Who.

Use the mental rehearsing techniques. And the takeaway here is very simple. If you’re hurt or taking time off, or if you are unable to train or train the way you normally train, for whatever reason, you can use your mind to decrease the amount of strength that you lose. All right that is everything you need to know about the science of thinking yourself.

Stronger, fitter, and. And this is something that bodybuilders have been talking about for decades now. They just have used the term, the mind muscle connection, and they discovered this through just trial and error and observation, and it’s something that has now been. Validated by scientific research, you certainly can influence your muscles with your mind.

And preliminary research on the mind muscle connection in particular suggests that it is a useful training technique that by focusing. Intently on the muscle that you are training. When you are training it. You may be able to perform slightly better on that exercise. You may be able to make that set.

You may be able to make each rep of that set a little bit more productive. The trouble, however, is that it lends itself to some exercises better than others. So that’s easy to do if it is a biceps curl or even a seated cable row. Not so easy to do if it is a barbell squad, because while the barbell squat rocks your quads, it is very much a quad dominant exercise.

It also puts a tremendous amount of strain on your back and on your hips and on your core, and of course, your hamstrings are involved as well. So it’s. Harder to focus just on one muscle group. When you are doing the barbell squat, the same thing would go for the deadlift, for example. Although with the bench press, you could probably just focus on your pecks and you might see a slight improvements in your performance if you were to do that, because those are really the prime movers.

Of course, your shoulders are involved and your triceps are involved, and your lots are involved to some degree as well, but primarily it’s your pecks move in the bar, anyway. If you have found any of this interesting, try it out. Try it out in your next workout. Use your intra set rest periods to do a bit of active imagery and see how it goes.

That is it for this episode, and in case you didn’t hear the intro, this was one of the bonus chapters of my new second edition of my book for Experienced Weightlifters Beyond Big, Leaner, Stronger, which is live right [email protected]. Also, you should know that the book Launch Bonanza is coming to an end, and that means that this is your last chance to enter to win over $6,000 of cool stuff, including.

A 30 minute zoom call with yours, unruly. That’s priceless. Of course, a Vitamix blender, a whoop fitness tracker. $200 Lululemon gift card, one month of Legion v i p coaching and more. Now all you have to do for a chance to win all those cool things is head over to www.blsbook.com and buy a copy of BBLs 2.0.

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