Think Yourself Stronger

How Imagery Can Improve Your Muscular Skills Almost as Much as Physical Practice

By Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, authors of The Body Has a Mind of its Own

Did you know that if you imagine exercising your little finger, you can actually make it stronger?

That's right. Lay your right hand on a flat surface and make believe that your pinkie is touching an obstacle. Now, without moving a muscle, think about pushing that obstacle as hard as you can, out toward the right, with your pinkie. Hold that thought for five seconds, rest for five seconds, and repeat 50 times.

If you do this for 15 minutes a day for three months, your pinkie will be will be 40 percent stronger compared to when you started, a recent study found.

If you engage in genuine physical practice, using your muscles in this new way, your pinkie will be 50 percent stronger. In other words, mental practice is nearly as good as physical practice in making you stronger and, if you extend it to your favorite sport, swifter, steadier, and more coordinated.

This scientific discovery, which is not yet widely known in the world of sports, has awesome implications for athletes everywhere, including all weekend warriors who don't have time to sneak away for three hours of practice every day.

If you want to be better at soccer, baseball, tennis, basketball, football, golf, swimming, figure skating, bowling, fencing, weight lifting, dancing, horseback riding—you name it—you can hone your skills through the power of your mind alone.

The Science of Motor Imagery and Body Maps

"...mental practice is nearly as good as physical practice in making you stronger and, if you extend it to your favorite sport, swifter, steadier, and more coordinated."

But take heed. Not every form of mental practice will do the trick. There are a hundred mental-performance-enhancing programs out there, many of which are trademarked and sold commercially despite having no solid science to back their claims. Only one form of mental practice—called motor imagery—has been proven scientifically to physically rewire the brain circuitry involved in physical skill performance.

Motor imagery underlies this transformation thanks to the body maps in your brain, specifically the maps that control all your movements.

You know what a map is. You can think of it as any scheme that spells out a one to one correspondence between two different things. On a road map, any given point on the map stands for some location in the larger world. Similarly, your brain maps every part of your body inside and out, your movements, the space around your body, and the social world.

For example, your brain has a fundamental touch map with swaths of tissue devoted to processing touch sensations from each finger, hand, cheek, leg, arm, foot, and toe, as well as your tongue, teeth, and throat and every other body part you can name. Another map collects signals from your joints, tendons, bones, and skin to provide you with a sense of where you are located in space. Other maps collect information from your viscera while others encode the volume of space around your body out to arms' length.

The map most relevant to your ability to perform skilled movements is called your motor map. Instead of receiving inputs from your skin, this map sends output signals down your spinal cord directly to your muscles. For example, each finger is represented separately in your motor map. When you decide to wiggle a finger, cells in the chosen finger map fire and make the movement happen. When you wiggle all your toes, the toe and foot regions of your motor map are active. When you perform more complex actions like, say, shooting hoops, a storm of lightning-quick cross-chatter occurs between many regions of your motor map, resulting in the smooth, coordinated movements.

Of course to make coordinated movements, as in learning any sport, you must first learn the individual components of the skill and then practice, practice, practice. In the beginning you are clumsy and you need to think about almost every element of movement. This is because your brain is laying down new connections within your motor maps that underlie your ability to swing the tennis racket, putt the golf ball, make a jump shot, pass the football, and so on.

Gaining Mastery

At this juncture, as a novice, motor imagery won't do you much good. But as you gradually master a complex skill, the "motor programs" you have created through real-life practice gradually migrate from higher to lower areas of your motor cortex. You no longer have to think about each movement. The skill becomes embedded in your fundamental motor maps. At this point, you can begin to apply imagery to your training repertoire.

But again, not just any kind of imagery will improve your motor maps. Visual imagery, where you imagine seeing yourself perform as if you were an outside observer, takes place in your mind's eye. It activates your brain's visual maps. It won't physically improve your skills.

In motor imagery, you imagine the full kinesthetic and muscular aspects of the experience. You don't do it in your mind's eye, you do it in your mind's body. What you see in your mind's eye is secondary. Your main focus is on feeling how your balance shifts as you flow through different stances or gaits, on what your feet are feeling with each step, leap, or kick, or how your muscles are contracting, straining, and relaxing as you swing, hit, push, or throw. This kind of imagery requires a strong sense of willing movements to happen. In doing so, your blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration will increase, even while you are sitting in a chair with your eyes closed.

"Studies show that motor imagery enables your brain to generate stronger signals to your muscles. It improves coordination by reducing signals that interfere with expert movements."

Studies show that motor imagery enables your brain to generate stronger signals to your muscles. It improves coordination by reducing signals that interfere with expert movements. Your motor maps become physically enlarged and finely sculpted—all through the power of your mind alone.

Incidentally, everything you just learned about sports also applies to musical training. When you learn piano, violin, guitar, clarinet, or any instrument, you are laying down new motor maps that underlie the skill. In violinists, the finger maps of the left hand, which is used for fingering the strings at high speed, are larger than those of the right hand which controls the bow. In pianists, who use both hands intensively, both hand maps bulk up.

A Dark Side of Motor Maps

There is, however, a dark side to highly trained motor maps. Under certain conditions, such as over-practicing a skill, motor maps can fuse. The condition is called "acquired dystonia," but if you're a pianist you'll know it as musician's cramp and if you're a golfer, you'll know it as the yips.

Certain parts of the motor map become blurred and fuse together. Where there were two separate finger maps, there is now one map for both fingers. You can no longer move the affected fingers separately at high speed. Pianists who once flew through arpeggios with finesse and grace can now barely practice their scales. Golfers who have striven for decades to perfect their games now spasm wildly whenever they try to putt. Even baseball players who over-practice may start missing throws from third plate to first plate.

The causes of these motor-map disorders remain poorly understood. Overpractice is one common way for it to happen, but that can't be the whole story. Some people play piano or golf their whole lives without their motor maps going haywire, while some unfortunate souls develop an acquired dystonia called writer's cramp, which makes their hands useless for handwriting but fine for any other kind of manual action. So there may be genetic or biological vulnerabilities in play.

Treatments for acquired dystonias are just now being developed. Since the brain is "plastic"—meaning it can change in response to experience—it may be possible to separate fused body maps by retraining the brain.

What's important to understand here is that your mind exerts remarkable power over your body and muscles. And by understanding how the mind works, you can improve your performance in virtually any physical endeavor.

Footnote: "From mental power to muscle power—gaining strength by using the mind" by Vinoth K. Ranganathan, Vlodek Siermionow, Jing Z. Liu, Vinod Sahgal, and Guang H. Yue, in Neurophysiologica vol 42 (2004) 944-956

About the Authors

Sandra Blakeslee is a regular contributor to The New York Times who specializes in the brain sciences. She has co-written many books, including Phantoms in the Brain with V.S. Ramachandran, On Intelligence with Jeff Hawkins, and Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce with Judith S. Wallersein. She is the third generation in a family of science writers.

Matthew Blakeslee is a freelance science writer in Los Angeles. He represents the fourth generation of Blakeslee science writers.

For more information on the book, The Body Has a Mind of its Own, visit: http://www.thebodyhasamindofitsown.com.

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