My Approach to Visualization Training and Implementation

From my experience and conversation with athletes across a wide spectrum of sport and skill level, my belief is that most athletes who use visualization are doing a version of the same exact thing. They close their eyes, picture themselves performing well, maybe imagine the crowd, feel the confidence, hype themselves up, and open their eyes feeling ready. It is a ritual that I am assuming has become so common in sport that trying to change someone perspective on the process or the use cases for it might come across as offensive.

But here is what the research actually says about visualization: the way many athletes practice visualization is significantly less effective than it could be, and in some cases it may be doing very little at all.

Let me be clear that this is not an argument against visualization. I find it to be one of the strongest tools to teach to clients of mine and I have seen first hand how powerful of a tool it can be. The evidence for mental imagery as a performance tool is substantial and consistent across decades of peer-reviewed research. A 2025 multilevel meta-analysis reviewing 86 studies and 3,593 athletes confirmed that imagery practice meaningfully enhances athletic performance across agility, muscle strength, and sport-specific skills (Simonsmeier et al., 2025). The tool works. The question is whether you are using it correctly, and I lean towards most people are not.

The problem with picturing perfection

The standard approach to visualization goes something like this: imagine the perfect race, the perfect shot, the perfect game. See yourself succeeding. Feel what winning feels like. Repeat that over and over until you feel confident.

This version of visualization has real value for confidence and motivational preparation. But it treats the mind like a highlight reel that you can go in and edit rather than the approach of being an engineer to your performance. And when competition arrives with all its noise, pressure, and unpredictability, the gap between the pristine mental highlight movie and the messy reality can actually increase anxiety rather than reduce it.

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2025 found that imagery content focused on emotional regulation and tactical decision-making, what researchers call affect imagery and strategy imagery, produced statistically significant improvements in athletic performance that purely visual success imagery did not (Volgemute, Vazne, and Malinauskas, 2025). Here is what that means: what you imagine matters just as much as how vividly you imagine it, and imagining only successful outcomes is a narrower use of the tool than the research supports.

What PETTLEP changes about the conversation

In 2001, sport psychologists Paul Holmes and Dave Collins published a framework called PETTLEP in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology that reframed how mental imagery should be understood and practiced. The acronym stands for Physical, Environment, Task, Timing, Learning, Emotion, and Perspective. It was built on an idea that for imagery to produce meaningful neurological benefit, it must closely resemble the actual conditions of performance rather than an idealized or the dream version of it (Holmes and Collins, 2001).

20 years after the publishing of PETTLEP it was yet again confirmed through studies on visualization that it stands as the most empirically supported framework for imagery intervention in sport, and that the incorporation of multi-sensory detail, including physical posture, environmental context, realistic timing, and emotional arousal, significantly enhances the neurophysiological congruence between mental rehearsal and actual execution (Smith et al., 2022).

What this means in practice is that the athlete sitting relaxed on a couch imagining a perfect game in a quiet room is not producing the same neural response as an athlete who imagines the same performance while standing in their competition stance, wearing their uniform, mentally replicating the sounds of the arena, the physical sensations of their body before competition, and the emotional arousal of the actual moment. The first version is better than nothing. The second version is what the research supports as genuinely effective.

We just finished the 2026 Winter Olympics and I really enjoyed watching the athletes prior to the start of a run in ski or snowboarding. If you haven’t seen it, look up some YouTube videos showing their visualization rehearsals. The majority of them are not just standing at the top of the hill eyes closed visualization, they are physically moving their body forward and back, spinning around in place, cranking their neck back as if they are trying to spot the ground on the landing of a jump. They are fully in the zone using as much vivid detail as possible right before a run.

A study published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology tested PETTLEP imagery against traditional imagery across two experiments involving varsity hockey players and junior gymnasts. The PETTLEP group outperformed the traditional imagery group in both studies, and in the gymnastics experiment, the PETTLEP group showed performance gains equivalent to the physical practice group over six weeks (Smith, Wright, Allsopp, and Westhead, 2007). That finding alone deserves more attention than it typically receives. Six weeks of structured PETTLEP imagery produced results comparable to six weeks of physical practice!

The case for visualizing adversity

Here is the angle that many people are not talking about: visualizing failure scenarios on purpose.

The dominant thought process with visualization is to be using it to see success, and understandably so. Nobody wants to dwell on the moments they want to avoid. But research on affect imagery and emotional regulation in sport suggests that athletes who rehearse their emotional and cognitive responses to adversity (e.g. a missed shot, a bad call, falling behind early, an injury mid-competition) develop a kind of mental inoculation that pure success imagery cannot provide (Volgemute, Vazne, and Malinauskas, 2025).

The logic follows directly from the PETTLEP framework. If the goal of imagery is to make the mental experience functionally equivalent to the actual performance experience, and if actual performance reliably includes moments of pressure, failure, and recovery…then imagery that excludes those moments is preparing the athlete for a competition that will never happen. The opponent is likely going to score. The shot is going to miss at times. The call is going to go against you. What do you do next?

The athlete who has rehearsed that moment mentally, who has practiced the emotional response and the cognitive reset, arrives at that moment with a pathway already formed in the brain to handle adversity. The athlete who has only visualized perfection arrives with no mental map for what they are currently experiencing.

This version of visualization is not about dwelling on negative outcomes. It is about scripting the response. The visualization is not "imagine yourself missing the shot." It is "imagine yourself missing the shot and executing your reset routine flawlessly before the next one." The adversity is the trigger. The response is what you are training.

A sidebar to this topic of visualizing errors is that you don’t want to start too early with this type of visualization. You need to be well versed in visualizing the positive side, using PETTLEP, and developing the skills of a vivid and effective routine. The reason you wouldn’t want to start too early with the visualization of the possible errors and negatives is because you don’t want to teach your brain that that is your reality. If you don’t have the control yet over your ability to see a mistake and visualize the fix, you might not be ready yet. It takes time and practice.

Michael Phelps has an amazing story about his use of visualization before the olympics. He would visualize a scenario where he dives into the pool and his goggles fill up with water. To make this situation more real, he would train at practice sometimes with his goggles full of water “swimming blind” to become comfortable with a potential horrible experience. And guess what, at the olympics he dove in and his goggles filled with water. He credits his ability to still win Gold in that event to all the visualization of an error moment and the physical training of swimming blind. He knew exactly how many strokes it would take to each wall even if he couldn’t see where he was going, and he didn’t lose focus or confidence because he had put his mind into this position 100s of times and trained his mind to handle it.

The dosage question

One of the most underexplored dimensions of visualization in applied sport psychology is dosage. How long, how often, and across what timeframe imagery practice should occur. A 2025 multilevel meta-analysis published in PMC investigated this question specifically and found that imagery practice of approximately ten minutes, conducted three times per week over a span of one hundred days, produced the strongest performance gains (Simonsmeier et al., 2025). The study also found that integrating imagery with one or two additional psychological skills, such as self-talk or pre-performance routines, produced better outcomes than imagery practiced in isolation.

This has significant practical implications. An athlete who spends 20 minutes before a game in an unfocused visualization attempt likely will be getting less benefit than one who practices ten structured minutes three times a week throughout the season as a regular training element. Visualization is a skill with a training dose like any other. Doing it once before a big game is like doing one rep of a new exercise the night before a competition and expecting it to matter.

What to take from this

The research makes three things clear that the common conversation about visualization tends to miss.

First: sensory and emotional fidelity matters enormously. Imagery practiced in conditions that resemble the actual performance environment, including the physical, emotional, and environmental elements of competition, produces measurably better results than imagery practiced in idealized, relaxed conditions.

Second: visualizing adversity and response is not pessimism. It is preparation. The athletes who arrive at difficult moments in competition having mentally rehearsed their response to those moments are not luckier than the ones who did not. They are better prepared.

Third: consistency over time outperforms intensity in the moment. Ten focused minutes of structured imagery practice three times a week, sustained across a competitive season, is what the evidence supports. The pre-game visualization ritual has value, but it is not a substitute for a practice built into training.

Visualization is one of the most consistently supported mental performance tools in the research literature. But like any tool, its value is determined by how skillfully it is used. Most athletes have heard that it works but the majority have not been taught how to make it actually work for them.

Stephen Mackanic is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) and holds a Master of Science in Sport Psychology from National University. He works with athletes and high performers through Mind Mackanic, with services available online nationwide and in-person in Albuquerque, NM.

References

Holmes, P. S., and Collins, D. J. (2001). The PETTLEP approach to motor imagery: A functional equivalence model for sport psychologists. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 13(1), 60–83.

Smith, D., Wright, C., Allsopp, A., and Westhead, H. (2007). It's all in the mind: PETTLEP-based imagery and sports performance. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 19(1), 80–92.

Smith, D., et al. (2022). Twenty years of PETTLEP imagery: An update and new direction for simulation-based training. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 60.

Simonsmeier, B. A., et al. (2025). The effects of imagery practice on athletes' performance: A multilevel meta-analysis with systematic review. PMC / PubMed Central.

Volgemute, I., Vazne, Z., and Malinauskas, R. (2025). The benefits of guided imagery on athletic performance: A mixed-methods approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 16.