To Burn Fat… Enter The Theater of Your Mind

I still can’t get over the fact that so many people think visualization and other forms of mental training are a waste of time or even “woo-woo.” Well, I’m not the only person who sees there’s a controversy here. In a new teleseminar series, “Trainer Face Off” Jimmy Smith called on top fitness professionals who were willing to discusss controversial topics in fitness, bodybuilding and weight loss. Mental training and psychology in weight loss and fitness was one of them and I was invited as a guest to speak on this. In today’s blog I’ve printed a transcript of one of the highlights of our interview. You will find it fascinating. I guarantee it…

JIMMY SMITH: Dr. Maxwell Maltz called it, “Entering the theatre of the mind.” It is one of the oldest methods for self improvement, visualization, that is. But a lot of people say they don’t know how to visualize. They don’t know how to really put themselves in their mind’s theater and project a new future. They visualize their perfect day, but they’re stuck in the minutia of the daily ritual, “I’m up at 7:00. I have my coffee. I get in the car. I go to work. I’m back at 5:00. Then I go to the gym.” They don’t know how to visualize their ideal body and their ideal life because they’ve never expereinced it. What are some tips or tricks that you can give to people to help them visualize their perfect body and life better?

TOM VENUTO: Well, for sure, some people are more visual than others. We have dominant representational systems, which is the way we create internal experience in our mind. Some people are more auditory. Some people are more visual. Some people are much more feeling and more kinesthetic. Some people find visualization to be a lot more natural than others.

The thing is, a characteristic of your brain and your mind is that it thinks in pictures. So you’re already thinking in pictures. If I say, “Think about a big, bright, red apple right now.” You didn’t see A-P-P-L-E in your mind. You saw the picture in your mind. It may not have been crystal clear for everybody, but the image did flash in your mind.So first of all, realize that not only can you make mental pictures, you’re already doing it. The more you practice visualization, the better you get at it. Practice is the key word there.

I like to talk about achieving a great physical condition as a combination of physical training and mental training. I talk a lot about mental training programs and part of the mental training is visualization. If you want to improve your visualization skills, you have to approach it as a program. You’re going to be making pictures in your mind all throughout the day anyway. Every time you have a thought, you’re going to see that thought as a picture. What you want to do is make it a formal process, just like you go to the gym and train.

You’ve set aside a time to go to the gym and train. Well, set aside a time for mental training. An ideal time to do it is first thing in the morning and also right before you go to sleep at night, because in both those cases, your unconscious mind is very primed and receptive to programming. Take a few deep breaths, get yourself in a deeply relaxed state and then begin to play those mental movies in your mind. As you go through that formal mental training process, where you’re actually doing a visualization training session, as opposed to doing it at random, you’ll start get better and better at it.

One trick, if you’re not that visual and you want to improve your visualization skills, is to use photos. One of the things that’s really popular now is a Vision Board. You clip out pictures of the goals you want to achieve. People are putting up a big bulletin board and snipping out pictures of everything in their life that they want: the cars, and homes, and the body that they want. So cut out pictures of the physique that you want. Forget what you look like now. Forget what you think you can achieve. Dream big! Pick an image of your IDEAL future body. Put it on your board and project that in the theater of your mind.

I’m looking up at my bulletin board right now and I have pictures pasted all over my bulletin board of some of the top natural bodybuilders - champions who are way beyond my current physique. And getting that image in my mind, and I’m looking at it every single day, it makes it easier for me to picture myself looking like that even though Ive never experienced it before. You dont have to experience it - This is using your imagination. I just picture my head on top of that physique. I close my eyes. I can see that body with fine detail and I imagine that it’s me. I see the image and I feel the feelings of what it would be like to have that body.

We have a lot of people in our Burn the Fat Inner Circle who have posted what they call Visualization Photos in our forums, where they cut out a photo of a body they wanted and they cut off a picture of their head and they pasted it onto the other body. We’ve got some people who did that in Photo Shop and it looks totally realistic. That’s extremely helpful in helping you become better at visualizing the end result of the body you want.

Also visualize yourself engaging in the action steps you’ll need to take, because it’s not just about the end results, it’s about the behaviors you need to take to get there. For example, suppose you’ve always considered yourself not a morning person in the past. Well, visualize yourself getting up early and feeling great and energetic and jumping out of bed. Make that part of your visualization training. If you’ve had a historty of skipping workouts, visualize yourself getting in your car or walking down to the gym, going to the gym and actually going through the workout. And make it a great workout.

I’ve read some pretty amazing stories about the elite athletes, how they do their mental rehearsal. Judd Biasiotto is one that comes to mind. He’s a sports psychologist, hypnotherapist, and motivational speaker…oh, and a world class powerlifter. Dr Judd wrote a lot of great books that have unfortunately gone out of print. A few of them were, “Hypnotize Me and Make Me Great” “Search For Greatness” and “2001: A Sports Odyssey.” In those books, he talked about his visualization ritual. Here’s a guy who would visualize and do mental training 3 or 4 hours a day when preparing for a record-breaking lift attempt. I know this is an extreme example. But I point it out just to prove the point of how seriously serious athletes take this mental programming process.

This is a guy who at a body weight of 132 pounds, he shocked the whole power-lifting world when he squatted 603 pounds. Do the math on that - its 4.5 times bodyweight! It’s just a staggering feat. It boggles the mind. And this is a guy who trained his mind as much as his body - maybe MORE - and a big part of that for him was visualization and doing it seriously and doing it in a really structured and formal way.

POSTSCRIPT If anyone is still skeptical or thinks this is “woo-woo”, I can’t blame you, really. There IS some weird stuff out there in the personal improvement field. So, take a look at the research. Visualization is one of the most highly validated techniques in sports psychology…

Athletes’ use of exercise imagery during weight training. J Strength Cond Res. 2007 Nov;21(4):1077-81. Silbernagel MS, Short SE, Ross-Stewart LC.

Imagery is a cognitive process during which people use their minds to create (or recreate) experiences that are similar to real-life situations. This study examined how college athletes used imagery during weight training. Subjects were 295 Division I (n = 163) and Division II (n = 132) college student athletes (men: n = 138, women: n = 157) who participated in a weight training program as a requirement of their sport. They completed a slightly modified version of the “Weight Lifting Imagery Questionnaire.” Results showed that appearance imagery (i.e., images related to the attainment of a fit-looking body) was used and considered the most effective followed by technique imagery (i.e., images related to performing the skill and techniques correctly with good form) and energy imagery (i.e., images related to getting “psyched up” or feeling energized). Other variables that effected imagery use were gender, age, time of season, and levels of motivation. In addition, gender, previous imagery training, and level of motivation had an effect on the perceptions of imagery effectiveness. Confidence in the ability to image was associated with both imagery use and effectiveness, and imagery use and effectiveness were associated with confidence in the weight room. The findings support previous research in exercise imagery that appearance imagery is most used followed by technique and energy imagery and extend them in such a way that strength coaches have practical advice on how to use imagery in a positive way with their athletes.

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07 November, 2008 posted in Mind & Motivation